Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South by Marie S. Molloy (review)

Marie S. Molloy’s Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth Century American South is a well-researched and ultimately convincing book about single women, whom she broadly defines as never married, late married, widowed, divorced, or separated—women who became single involuntarily or voluntarily. The women she explores were born between 1810 and 1860. Using a vast array of their letters, diaries, and journals— both printed and manuscript—plus court records, she explores this generation of women thematically rather than chronologically (although the postbellum era looms large in her arguments).

As the book’s title makes clear, this is a work about women who were “predominately from privileged families, who had benefited from owning slaves in the antebellum and Civil War eras” (1). Indeed, it was their wealth, power, and prevalent ideals of femininity that both constrained their choices and gave agency to their lives. The author’s main argument is that, paradoxically, “singleness was ultimately a route to female autonomy for slaveholding women in spite of certain restrictions placed on them” (2). Their highly valued “contribution and services to the family,” the place where they first gained respect and new positive identities, made it possible for them to become increasingly active outside the family in time of economic need and because they simply wanted to “broaden their sphere” (4). The ability of women to support themselves or their family led to greater self-respect and a desire for personal agency.

Molloy laid the foundation of the analysis to follow on “the construction of femininity in the antebellum South,” the title of her first chapter. There is little new here, but because little of what we know about women and gender from this era and this region addresses single women, it seems necessary. As she does throughout the book, Molloy relies heavily on Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller’s pathbreaking 1984 work, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840, and its construction of the concept of single blessedness for northern women. In chapter 1, Molloy begins to chip away at our stereotypical understanding of southern women—to envision a southern single blessedness. According to her, the period following the Civil War “was important in helping to determine how permanent the changes in [single women’s] lives were.” During the war “old notions of male authority and female submission and dependence started to slip away” (38). Patriarchal authority broke down and single women stepped up and into the breach.

To examine how slowly but ineluctably they stepped into that breach, chapter 2 focuses explicitly on the ways gender roles were inextricably linked to the family. While the family would ultimately constrain women, it also fashioned “women’s attachment to ‘usefulness’” learned in the family structure, which served to advance “a limited degree of personal autonomy” (41). Readers of Liberty, a Better Husband might question how revelatory this is; Molloy explains its significance. Changes in northern immigration, urbanization, and technology meant that single women in the North eagerly embraced new opportunities to step out of the so-called cult of domesticity. Molloy argues that “these changes were much slower to take place in the South” because “the construction of the southern lady was tied to the maintenance and protection of a slaveholding society” (44). But after the Civil War, things did change and women’s skills and confidence that had developed in the family became crucial. She makes clear why adding a geographic component to our understanding of single women is important.

In chapters devoted to work and to women’s friendship, Molloy explores in detail changing gender roles. She ultimately argues that “the blossoming of new opportunities for women [as nurses, teachers, plantation managers—which she examines at length] was linked to the respect and admiration that they had gained during wartime” while it also “reflected the growing popularity of the Cult of...