Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80 (review)

African-American slavery continues to be revised and reviewed as one of the most formative institutions in American society and culture. Once seen by many historians as a curious departure from a dominant American liberalism, or as largely a way of organizing labor and production, slavery is now appreciated as a complex phenomenon that shaped the thoughts and identities, as well as the material conditions, of slaves, masters, and others. Slavery not only was an institution that structured certain choices and necessities; it also was a way of life that made southerners of both races want to choose, or placate, or take risks.

Weiner’s Mistresses and Slaves explores this personal, lived-in dimension of slavery by looking at the experiences of slave women and mistresses in South Carolina (and, occasionally, in Georgia and Alabama as well), as they literally made slavery something personal, day by day. With imagination and care, Weiner uses diaries, fiction, and folklore to inquire about women’s experiences, on the solid premise that because slave and free women were at the center of domestic life, they were central to whether slavery stood or fell as a social institution. She realizes that, in practice, slavery and its aftermath were a matter of relationships between people. Her point is that however twisted by abuses of power and struggles of resistance these relationships were, we need to grasp how they worked if we are to understand slavery’s tenacious hold on minds as well as bodies.

In her use of gender to frame questions of class and race, Weiner is exploring historical ground recently worked by many others, including Clinton, Fox-Genovese, Whites, Hodes, Hunter, White, and Bynum. ¹ Weiner is less of an innovator in this historiography than a judicious, clear-headed observer of slavery’s existential complexities. One strength of her approach is the balance that she maintains in her descriptions of both black and white women’s daily work. Weiner effectively shows how the imperatives of race and womanhood survived the Civil War, still powerful if not unchanged.

Weiner’s principal argument is that similar, gender-bound values of mid-nineteenth-century domesticity and womanhood mattered to both slave and free women. Enslaved women were generally unable to act on these values. Mistresses, who had the power to act, often shied away from the implications of inhabiting a female world with black women that they owned. As beneficiaries of slavery, they believed in its rightness, and mostly worked to sustain it. Even so, Weiner argues, despite inequality and racial blinders, mistresses and their female slaves sometimes shared experiences. For instance, women’s work in caring for the sick or in keeping domestic production running sometimes brought free and slave women to a sense of mutual effort. The wisdom of Weiner’s book is to suggest that these moments must be appreciated for their dual potential: They were liberating to the extent that women could use them to see through the gender ideology that kept all women subservient, but they could also be profoundly conservative, as women of both races settled for simply making the best of their circumscribed lives.