Out of the House of Bondage
The Transformation of the Plantation Household

Glymph challenges popular depictions of mistresses as 'friends' and 'allies' of slaves in the plantation household.

Thavolia Glymph (Author)

9780521703987, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 June 2008

296 pages
23.1 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.42 kg

"Out of the House of Bondage presents a theoretically sophisticated, tightly argued challenge to the existing scholarship on black and white women in the nineteenth century South." -Frank Towers, Labour/Le Travail

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

1. The gender of violence
2. 'Beyond the limits of decency': women in slavery
3. Making 'better girls': Southern women and the claims of domesticity
4. 'Nothing but deception in them': the war within
5. Out of the house of bondage: a sundering of ties, 1865–6
6. 'A makeshift kind of life': free women and free homes
7. 'Wild notions of right and wrong': from home to the streets.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], History of the Americas [HBJK]