"Marriage Trauma" and Homosocial First Aid: Surveillance and Submission among Slaveholding Women

This article explores the networks of support, encouragement, and coercion that arose around the wedding preparations of a number of couples in North Carolina and South Carolina from the 1810s through the 1850s. Even as the appeal of couple-centered romantic love grew, many white southerners disregarded bourgeois self-discipline in marriage choices and adhered to older, aristocratic patterns of community surveillance. The homosocial networks that emerged around marriage rituals reveal how patriarchal ideology and incentives structured both men's and women's behavior. Whereas middle-class women's homosocial bonds gave them the strength to reshape patriarchal dictates or challenge male authority, southern women's "female world" aligned with, and in fact assumed, an aristocratic, patriarchal culture. By both the fact and manner of their submission to patriarchs, women placed themselves and their relationships at the center of what made their culture southern, and exceptional.