Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South

by Susanna Delfino (Editor), Michele Gillespie (Editor)

Although historians over the past two decades have written extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they have largely neglected the world of the working woman. Neither Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labors of ordinary southern women--white, free black, and Indian.

Contributors to this volume illuminate women's involvement in the southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays explore the working lives of a wide range of women--nuns and prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic servants--in urban and rural settings across the antebellum South. By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially acknowledged and "invisible" work within the context of cultural attitudes regarding women's proper place in society, the book sheds new light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race, class, and gender in the modernizing South.

The contributors are E. Susan Barber, Bess Beatty, Emily Bingham, James Taylor Carson, Emily Clark, Stephanie Cole, Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, Sarah Hill, Barbara J. Howe, Timothy J. Lockley, Stephanie McCurry, Diane Batts Morrow, and Penny L. Richards.

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Contributors
E. Susan Barber, College of Notre Dame of Maryland (Baltimore, Md.)
Bess Beatty, Oregon State University (Eugene, Ore.)
Emily Bingham (Louisville, Ky.)
James Taylor Carson, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
Emily Clark, University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg, Miss.)
Stephanie Cole, University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington, Tex.)
Susanna Delfino, University of Genoa (Genoa, Italy)
Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
Sarah Hill (Atlanta, Ga.)
Barbara J. Howe, West Virginia University (Morgantown, W. Va.)
Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick (Coventry, England)
Stephanie McCurry, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
Diane Batts Morrow, University of Georgia (Athens, Ga.)
Penny L. Richards, UCLA Center for the Study of Women (Los Angeles, Calif.)
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Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2002

Reviews

[Maddie]

Read for comps

[Yaaresse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good collection of articles on the lives of less affluent free women in the 1800s. We have this image of women then as a scene from Gone With the Wind, where all women were either Southern Belles or slaves. The fact is that it wasn't that simplistic.

These are academic articles, so the reading can be a bit of a chore sometimes. Still, lots of good information here. I read if for pleasure, having an interest in the lives of "regular folk" in that time period, but I can see where someone looking to write a novel set in that period would find this a wonderful resource.