Which Family Values?

Which Family Values? Victoria E. Bynum. Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. Chapel HiU: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xvi + 233 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2016-4 (d); 0-8078-4361-x (pb); $34.95 (d); $12.95 (pb). Joan E. Cashin. A Family Venture. Men and Women on the Southern Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. χ + 198 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-19-505344-3 (cl); $24.95. Ann Patron Malone. Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana. Chapel HiU: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xiv + 369 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2026-1 (d); $39.95. Jane H. Pease AU these books, despite the somewhat different intention of one, amplify or alter what we know about antebeUum Southern families, women's varied roles within them, and the shaping impact of pubhc law and events on female behavior. CoUectivdy they demonstrate once again that wide variations in famüy patterns are not a late twentieth-century invention and that women's strategies for their own and their famihes' survival often accord Ul with prevailing stereotypes—past or present. Joan Cashin's A Family Venture: [Privileged White] Men and Women on the Southern Frontier interacts with and complements Ann Patton Malone's Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana to clarify the impart of establishing isolated plantations on the private Uves and family processes of those who created them. Victoria Bynum's Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South, whüe it deals with a more settled population in North Carolina, treats some of the middling folk so often ignored in histories of the antebeUum South, those who neither owned slaves nor were slaves. Cashin examines most dosdy the famUies of forty-nine planters who migrated from Virginia and the Carolinas to states west of the Georgia-Alabama Hne and to scattered frontier areas in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida. That their fathers, twenty in aU, had each been settled in the Southeast at least since the Revolution and had, between 1790 and 1830, owned at least twenty slaves is intended to estabhsh the migrants' truly southern roots and initial advantages. For Cashin, these men, who went west with their wives, dtildren, and slaves, represent the patriarchy commonly associated with the old plantation South but mediated there by broad kin networks that consoled, if they did not empower, the women © 1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol s No. 2 (Fall)___________________ 1993 Book Review: Jane H. Pease 163 caught in its vise. In addition, these westward-moving planters had been nurtured in the paternalism by which Southern honor presumably reined in the power of a master over his slaves. Cashin, accepting the prevalence of such a benign paternahsm and the female communal restraints on patriarchy in the seaboard South, argues that frontier isolation from kith and kin severely eroded both. The narrowing of the kin network Cashin addresses by comparing the structure of a random sample of white male-headed households in six eastern counties from 1810 to 1830 with a random sample of white male planter-headed households in six southwestern counties from 1840 to 1860. She finds that, whüe only a quarter of the former were nudear in form, over half of the latter were. That the form of a third of the early and eastern and a quarter of the later southwestern households could not be identified, that female-headed households were exduded from both samples, and that non-planters were included in the early sample but not the later, may, however, raise questions about conclusions based on their comparison. Nonetheless, it does seem likely that given their much shorter period of residence southwestern complex famihes would be as few as 23 percent of the households whüe such f amilies in the settled East would comprise at least 38 percent. These statistical compUations reinforce Cashin's extensive anecdotal evidence, drawn mainly from f amüy correspondence, that wives, who had generaUy opposed moving west because they valued the support of relatives and friends and antidpated that frontier Hving would leave them relying too...