Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society

7. Work and Workers

7 Work and Workers All but an elite few Charleston women and girls worked,and that work—or freedom from work—con¤gured women’s self-perceptions and public attitudes toward women. Recreation constituted the hallmark of the master class, so leisured ladies did not and could not labor for wages without jeopardizing status and reputation. Slave women’s regular hard work formed a second strand of women’s entwined economic realities. Their labor enabled the mistress’s leisure. Where the lady could not work, the slave woman could never work hard enough or long enough. These diametric economic possibilities, practices, and aspirations of elite ladies and slave women determined the economic realities and identities of all other women. The wealthiest among the city’s free brown elite aspired to the much-esteemed status of lady and risked shattering this image if they worked for pay. Few achieved the goal of becoming a lady. In contrast, most free women of color supported their families or supplemented the family economy. They took pride in their achievements and, in fact, were respected by many fellow city residents, but their work separated them from women of the brown elite and the master class. Likewise, the hard work of white laboring women de¤ned and differentiated them from other Charleston women. In slave society, the work of the “degraded [negro] class” enabled the “civilized” leisure of their white owners. But this axiom broke down, weighted by another reality: myriad white women also labored outside their households, which confounded role expectations forged in dichotomies of black and white, slave and free. The labor of one woman threw into sharp relief the expected work or leisure of another , and all Charleston women were identi¤ed, in part, by the fact that they did not perform the same work as the others.1 Several features of Charleston work and workers effectively frame this analysis , foremost among which is the fact that women’s work and women workers were essential to the city economy. At the time of the ¤rst federal census, women of European and African descent headed nearly 20 percent of all Charleston households, and most of those women worked for wages. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city directories indicate that substantial numbers of women of color and white women worked in and beyond their households even when they owned slaves. While ®awed (like most early censuses), the special city census of 1848 constituted the city’s ¤rst systematic attempt to collect information regarding occupations of its inhabitants.In that year,enumerators listed a total of nearly 4,700 white, “black”(slave), and “free colored”women workers, or over 38 percent of all city laborers (see table 6). They were boardinghouse keepers, midwives, shopkeepers, madams, pastry cooks, teachers, house servants , mantua makers, market women, tailors, and more. While these ¤gures Continued on the next page underestimate the numbers of Charleston workers, the tally reveals laboring women’s centrality to the city.2 At least eight additional attributes characterize work in Charleston: (1) it was gendered; (2) it was wrapped in race-speci¤c ideas of sexuality; (3) it was seasonal ; (4) distinctive work venues offered opportunities for mobility; (5) there was much opportunity for sabotage; (6) slave hiring was central to the economy; (7) feme sole traders were also at the heart of the economy; and (8) benevolent work of the master class was important to the economy. Work was gendered. That is, city residents determined task assignments partly by notions of proper activities for women and men. However, no evidence indicates that divisions between women’s work and men’s work bridged a massive gulf between mistresses and slave women, or between slaves and free women of Table 6. Continued Work and Workers 129 African descent. Charleston slaves and their owners did not engage in communal , female tasks like quilting or sewing clothes as occurred on some plantations . As the following pages will reveal, little opportunity existed to forge the kind of cross-racial gender solidarity that some historians have found on large plantations. In fact, a prevailing citywide fear of slave insurrection, coupled with a fundamental distrust of African Americans, separated black, brown, and white Charlestonians into their appointed, distinct social places.3 Work also came wrapped in race-speci¤c ideas of sexuality, a second de¤ning characteristic of labor in this city. With puberty came additional tasks for female slaves—cooking...