The Big House after Slavery: Virginia Plantation Families and Their Postbellum Domestic Experiment

Notes

199 notes archives and Collections, institutional abbreviations the following abbreviations are used for institutions housing archives and collections cited in the notes: Du rare book, Manuscript, and special Collections library, Duke university, Durham, N.C. uNC southern historical Collection, Wilson library, the university of North Carolina at Chapel hill, N.C. uva special Collections, university of virginia library, Charlottesville, va. vhs virginia historical society, richmond, va. WM special Collections research Center, earl gregg swem library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, va. introduction 1. sally Carter randolph to isaetta randolph hubard (fragment), “1870s” (after 1871), randolph-hubard Collection, uva. for biographical information on benjamin franklin randolph and sally randolph Carter, see “benjamin franklin and sally Champe Carter randolph,” in Collected Papers to Commemorate Fifty Years of the Monticello Association of the Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, ed. george green shackelford (Charlottesville, va.: Monticello association, 1965), and “benjamin franklin randolph,” in Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, http:// wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/benjamin_franklin_randolph (accessed June 1, 2008). sally Carter’s comment about having “no responsibility” as a plantation mistress in the antebellum period is somewhat misleading about the work that was required of white plantation women. for information on the nature of white women’s work on antebellum plantations, see fox-genovese, Within the 200 Notes to Pages 1฀‒฀7 Plantation Household, 6–7, 119–20; Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves, 23–49; Clinton, The Plantation Mistress; scott, The Southern Lady. 2. in particular, see works by Catherine Clinton, Marli Weiner, and elizabeth fox-genovese on antebellum plantation women. 3. for the postwar period, see Censer, “a Changing World of Work”; glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 137–203; Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, 144–50; Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves; scott, The Southern Lady; edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 107–44; bleser and heath, “the Clays of alabama.” 4. for more on antebellum gender roles and conceptions of manhood, see genovese , “‘our family, White and black’”; Wyatt-brown, Southern Honor; greenberg , Honor and Slavery; friend and glover, Southern Manhood. 5. though numerous scholars have conducted historical studies of organizations such as the grange and the farmers’ alliance, little attention has been paid the gender component of those organizations. Julie roy Jeffrey is the only historian to address directly the role of women in these organizations in the postwar south. see Jeffrey, “Women in the southern farmers’ alliance.” similarly, much research is still needed on women in virginia churches during the postwar years, specifically the Presbyterian and episcopal denominations. 6. on postwar virginia politics, especially the readjusters and the battle over the state debt, see Maddex, The Virginia Conservatives, and Dailey, Before Jim Crow. 7. ayers, The Promise of the New South, ix–x, 25–26, 28. for women’s experiences in New south urban areas, see scott, The Southern Lady and Natural Allies ; Janney, Burying the Dead But Not the Past; treadway, Women of Mark; e. h. turner, Women, Culture, and Community; sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South. these historians have ably demonstrated that the growth of employment options as well as the ease of modern conveniences and the expansion of organizational life in towns and cities near the end of the nineteenth century helped blur even more the boundaries between public and private. these developments made it possible for both women and men to enjoy a notable presence in the public realm, similar to their middle-class Northern counterparts. at the same time, complex social changes were prompting a marked backlash and spawning a conservative movement that celebrated the southern identity and culture of an earlier era. the adult descendants of postwar planters may have witnessed and even contributed to a further erosion of the old antebellum patriarchal order in their homes, offices, and gathering places in the New south, but it is also likely that they participated in or supported some activities that legitimated old gender roles. in some ways, then, they moved beyond the positions their parents had taken in the more immediate postwar period while still embracing ideas their grandparents would easily have accepted. 8. for the most influential and comprehensive scholarship on the changing nature of the postbellum south, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, and ayers , The Promise of the New South. for a more detailed discussion of the massive Notes to Pages 7฀‒฀8 201 historiography on the postwar south, see Woodman, “economic reconstruction...