Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (review)

Dunaway continues her explorations of Appalachia in Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South. In this detailed work, she considers how gender, race, and class shaped the lives of the region's most marginal women—slaves, free blacks, poor whites, and natives.

In broad strokes, Dunaway argues that the separate-spheres ideology and "cult of domesticity" promulgated by antebellum writers bore little resemblance to the lives of mountain women. She maintains that poor and enslaved women could not—or would not—maintain the stark dichotomy between home and workplace that was fundamental to the separate-spheres ideology. Whether compelled by force or necessity, women labored in fields, engaged in domestic manufacturing, operated small businesses, and worked as wage laborers. Dunaway carries her argument against separate spheres a step further, concluding that "there was not a clear division between household labors and market commodity production" (192–193).

Women's participation in the workforce carried a social price. Poor whites who performed stigmatized labor surrendered their racial prerogatives. As Dunaway notes, "poor white women were often 'racialized' as barbaric throwbacks because their work and family patterns were too similar to those of nonwhite females in the minds of affluent Appalachians" (127). Those who defied gender and racial norms confronted a legal system that empowered officials to regulate and disrupt the families of poor whites, free blacks, and the enslaved. For those on the bottom of the South's social ladder, the bourgeois family idealized in the "cult of domesticity" proved an elusive dream.

Despite its many strengths, Dunaway's study is not without flaws. Although she is sensitive to chronological change in her discussions of Cherokee women, her treatment of poor whites, free blacks, and slaves is often static. More bothersome is Dunaway's use of secondary sources. On at least two occasions, Dunaway supports assertions about the mountain South with evidence from regions outside Appalachia.¹ Similar problems plague her use of primary sources. Although Women, Work, and Family rests upon a vast body of research, certain citations are imprecise, and Dunaway's handling of sources is questionable. She notes, for example, that "free born mulatto James Merrick was 'taken in possession' and sold as a slave when his western Maryland employer died" (252). In support, Dunaway cites page 134 of Rose's anthology A Documentary History of Slavery in North America, but this page contains no reference to Merrick or the enslavement of free blacks; it discusses Nat Turner.²

Likewise, Dunaway quotes a Virginia slaveholder who worried that "a death struggle must come between the two classes, on which one or the other w[ould] be extinguished forever" (123). Because the quotation is situated within a paragraph about tensions between planters and landless whites, the implication is that the anonymous master feared an intraracial class conflict. In actuality, the "death struggle" that this slaveholder feared was an interracial conflagration. Dunaway's anonymous slaveholder was Henry Berry of Virginia, who was raising the specter of slave revolts in the aftermath of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion. Addressing the Virginia House of Delegates, Berry contended that harsher slave codes offered little protection against insurrections and that Virginia faced a "mighty avalanche" unless it abolished slavery.³ Whether these are isolated—even trifling—incidents or symptoms of larger, more systemic problems must remain for future reviewers to decide, but they do raise questions about the precision of Dunaway's research.