Description: This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as "friends" and "allies" of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal.
Brief description: Thavolia Glymph (Ph.D. Economic History, Purdue University) is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at Duke University. She has co-edited two volumes of the award-winning Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation series and published scholarly articles in five book collections. Glymph's far-ranging experience as a scholar and educator extends to various teaching appointments and museum projects. Her current work focuses on a comparative study of plantation households in Brazil and the US South, Civil War soldiers in Egypt after the Civil War, and a history of women in the Civil War.
Review Quotes: "Combining the tools of an economic and social historian with a flair for robust cross-examination of historical sources, Thavolia Glymph has fashioned a study of women in the plantation household into a sweeping reinterpretation of the post-slavery South." -Barbara J. Fields, Columbia University