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8 Leisure and Recreation Slavery afforded leisure to Charleston’s wealthiest slave owners, leisure con-¤rmed wealth, and the wealthy deliberately cultivated social and cultural activities to distinguish themselves as a ruling, aristocratic elite. While slaves worked hard and rarely played, wealthy white owners seldom worked and played earnestly to “keep ahead, to set the pace, and to adopt each new fashion in thought and theory as well as in dress.” These intertwined realities of abundant and scarce recreation elevated women of the master class above, especially, slave women. The ways in which other Charleston women aspired to socialize and amuse themselves, and their actual opportunities for play, delimited one category of woman from another. Likewise, the diverse recreational activities they pursued, and the nature and frequency of those endeavors,constituted different but interwoven strands of women’s de¤ning experiences.1 By the mid-eighteenth century, the master class dominated much recreation in Charleston and, indeed, had transformed the city into a social and cultural winter garden for all low-country planter families. Girls and women of the master class took center stage during most winter social activities, because mastering the art of entertainment distinguished a lady; leisure entwined with status and duty.Of equal importance,women of the master class (and the brown elite) capitalized on their customary social roles to carve out a public presence and exert a measure of in®uence in their patriarchal world. Other city residents also played, notwithstanding the control of many forms of recreation by the master class.Slaves deftly recast work into leisure by visiting with friends and relatives in the city market, or by taking detours while delivering messages for their owners. Charleston slave women wielded their rare, sanctioned leisure time as an instrument of self-preservation or resistance, because they had learned how to negotiate slavery’s uneven power relations to increase their survival odds. Slaves were not alone in manipulating the political uses of leisure. Excluded from citizenship as well as the cultural ventures of af®uent white people, members of Charleston’s free brown elite created their own, exclusive social spaces, often in the form of activities closely resembling those of the master class. The city’s disreputable residents took advantage of recreational time by transforming play into pro¤t; they picked pockets and bilked drunken revelers of their currency and valuables.Virtually all Charleston women enjoyed leisure and maximized the designing functions of amusement. As in all aspects of their lives, leisure simultaneously entwined women and separated them. What was one woman’s play was another’s hard work, and the social functions attended by one woman purposefully excluded another. The same fault lines of race, condition, class, and gender that divided all of Charleston life also determined and segregated recreation. Leisure de¤ned white and black, rich and poor, slave and free, male and female. Charleston residents had progressedfrombrawling and eye-gouging in muddy streets to theatergoing. In the ¤rst half of the eighteenthcentury, the burgeoning master class forged itself into a European-styled aristocracy. Carolina’s ladies and gentlemen delineated themselves through their culture—that constellation of habits and artifacts related to clothing, food, drink, architecture, landscaping , furniture, and mannerisms—and Charleston became their playground as well as their mercantile hub. With the 1762 founding of the St. Cecilia Society, a concert association named for the patron saint of music, elite Charlestonians established their city’s reputation as a center of music and drama. More than a decade before the American Revolution, they boasted three theaters. Imitating the English aristocratic penchant for riding and hunting, Charleston gentlemen also formed hunt clubs, and the “Charlestown Races” gained renown as an aristocratic sporting and social event occasioned by dinners and balls. By the 1820s, the St. Cecilia Society had evolved from its eighteenth-century concert emphasis into an elite dancing club, in which membership became an inherited perquisite of prestige and power. A multitude of northerners and foreign visitors commented on the city’s vibrant social scene and the young girls who whirled at its center.2 Girls and women played pivotal roles in this ongoing process of self-creation and self-perpetuation. Because intermarriage constituted an integral strategy for forging and maintaining economic and social dominion, much of the city’s social life facilitated the fundamental goal of devising unions between Carolina ’s most af®uent and powerful families. Travelers and residents alike acknowledged the “extreme youth” of Charleston high society, where “the belles [were...

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