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Conclusion It is impossible wholly to understand slavery and slave society without fully illuminating women’s experiences, and a true portrait of women’s lives emerges only when all the players—slave women, free women of African descent, white women of the laboring classes, and master-class women—are analyzed in juxtaposition . The American Revolution profoundly altered every woman’s life and affected all groups of women. First, on a personal level, the sheer mayhem in South Carolina—economic dislocation, rampaging soldiers (on both sides), guerilla warfare, and British siege and occupation—created physical and emotional scars from which some women never recovered. It is, perhaps, old news to point out the viciousness of the Revolution in the South or the transformative effects of any military con®ict, but what has been overlooked thus far is the way that the war, and its aftermath, magni¤ed and entangled women’s interdependent lives and relationships, roles, and self-perceptions. The misfortune of one individual rippled across the social landscape and swelled into life-altering events for many women and their families. When a wealthy woman ran short of liquid assets, female shopkeepers and artisans had lighter pockets, and the city’s poorest women went begging for lack of charitable contributions; and when a patriot artisan lost business to a loyalist counterpart, that family’s slaves might ®ee to freedom or, conversely, be appropriated and sold by British of¤cers. Likewise, when a slave woman ran, her mistress’s life changed. It is common knowledge that one of the war’s greatest effects was the mass exodus of thousands of slaves from the low country. This enormous loss of laborers hardened slave owners’ resolve to shore up the institution of slavery and steeled slaves’ determination to remain free. The revolutionary era marked a turning point in the growth of Charleston’s free black and brown populations. However, what has not been underscored is the way that these extraordinary demographic transformations affected women’s perceptions of one another. Harried mistresses eyed slave women with greater suspicion. Slave women, who had tasted small liberties and observed the ruling class being ruled by occupation forces, braced themselves for future confrontations, con¤dent of their ability to negotiate the convoluted relations of power in slave society. In public and private speech, women and men of the master class drew upon their wartime struggles with slaves, re-¤ned and reiterated diametric images of women, and deployed those embellished stereotypes to rationalize the supremacy not only of elite ladies over all other women but also of the master class over all other social groups. PostRevolution social reconstruction became distinctly gendered work. On a more positive note, many women gleaned from the war a sense of their own political identities and strength. Af®uent ladies seized upon opportunities presented by the experiment of nation building and proved that the recreational was political. They suffused with political meaning their customary role as Charleston’s social arbiters and deftly transformed the social and cultural into the political and civic: they created a public and political role—the civic host— in a world that excluded women from politics. In this respect a thread of continuity joined wealthy southern and northern women, many of whom also experienced the politicizing effects of the American Revolution. Although freedom was race-speci¤c and nation building in the Deep South was all about reinvigorating slavery, slaves also realized a new sense of empowerment. If they had chosen to remain in South Carolina,they negotiated for greater concessions, like the liberty to choose a different owner; if they had opted to leave, they declared with con¤dence to Crown of¤cials that they had been born free. In petitions to the new state government, free laboring women also revealed an awareness of their entitlement. They vowed that con¤scated property should be returned to them because they had earned it through their own “toil, frugality and attention.” In these and similar efforts to re-forge their lives amid, and in the wake of, physical and emotional turmoil, the city’s women alternately clashed and cooperated. But in so doing they highlighted the shared dependency of southern women’s lives in this formative era. Their experiences provide a southern perspective—a panorama complicated by slavery—on women’s transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.1 Protocols and customs surrounding marriage and sex de¤ned who was black and white, slave and free. Members of the master...

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