Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835 (review)

Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835. By Cynthia A. Kierner (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998) 304 pp. $55.00 cloth $18.95 paper.

In accounts of the colonial American South, women appear as frequent and active participants in public life. By the early nineteenth century, however, they seem to have disappeared from that venue almost entirely, swallowed up in the labor of slavery and of families and in the onrushing discourse of female domesticity. "How and why," Kierner asks in her introduction, "did women's relation to public life apparently change so dramatically in the decades that separated the colonial and the antebellum eras?" (1) How could there be so many women "deeply aware of and involved in public matters" in the early eighteenth century and yet, apparently, so few 100 years later? Kierner's focus is on elite white women in Virginia and the Carolinas, and some of her conclusions are specific to these groups and areas. Her attempt to puzzle through this vexing conundrum, however, has important implications for historians generally.

Although she is also careful to identify changes (and continuities) in the material and social organization of women's lives, Kierner seeks her answer primarily in cultural change, particularly in evolving ideas of what constituted "public" life. The years after the revolution witnessed a critical narrowing of what Americans understood to constitute a public presence. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Kierner suggests, the measure of "public-ness" was the presence of males (and the absence of females--except, perhaps, as affirming observers) rather than any quality inherent in the activity or arena.

The particular trajectory of this shift in Virginia and the Carolinas was fundamentally determined by slavery. The commitment of the planter classes to that institution strengthened their commitment to authoritarian social structures and forestalled the emergence of radical critiques that might have encompassed gender as well as race.

Yet, it is a mistake, Kierner argues, to take the resulting patriarchal discourse fully at face value. In fact, throughout the antebellum era "white southern women . . . participated in the affairs of the public sphere and, in some instances, influenced the form and content of public life" (213)--as churchgoers, essayists, novelists, members of voluntary societies, social leaders, and sponsors of a myriad of public events. Kierner attributes the failure of these activities to generate a self-conscious feminist critique to their failure to assume a distinctly sex-segregated form--a development that fostered a certain self-conscious autonomy in the North.

In addition to its contributions to the ongoing critique of the public sphere, Beyond the Household offers provocative readings of the "public performance" of social rank as Southern elites attempted to consolidate themselves as a class--first against poorer whites and later against enslaved African-Americans.

Jeanne Boydston
University of Wisconsin, Madison

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