Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South

The nature of female labor in the antebellum Appalachian South was shaped by race, ethnicity, and/or class positions.

Wilma A. Dunaway (Author)

9780521886192, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 March 2008

320 pages, 10 tables
24.1 x 16.1 x 2.1 cm, 0.59 kg

"...a well-crafted study that will no doubt offer a starting point for many other scholars who wish to consider issues of gender within a specific region, especially the antebellum South." -Deborah L. Bauer, H-Women

Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground to examine the race, class, and ethnic differences among antebellum Southern Appalachian women. Most women defied separate spheres of gender conventions to undertake agricultural and non-agricultural labors that were essential to family survival or community well-being. Unlike elite and middle-class females, Cherokee, black, and poor white women engaged in stigmatized labors and worked alongside males in cross-racial settings. To support their work portfolios, non-white and most poor white women constructed non-patriarchal families that challenged cultural ideals of motherhood. Churches and courts inequitably regulated the sexual behaviors of these women and treated their households as aberrations that were not entitled to the legal privilege of family sanctity. Legal and religious officials sanctioned family break-ups and the removal, indenturement, or enslavement of their children. Still, many women resisted patriarchal conventions through their work lives, family roles, and group activism.

Introduction
Part I. Racial, Ethnic, and Class Disjunctures among Appalachian Women: 1. No gendered sisterhood: ethnic and religious conflict among Euro-American women
2. Not a shared patriarchal space: imperialism, racism, and cultural persistence of indigenous Appalachian women
3. Not a shared sisterhood of subordination: racism, slavery, and resistance by black Appalachian females
4. Not even sisters among their own kind: the centrality of class divisions among Appalachian women
Part II. Structural and Social Contradictions between Women's Productive and Reproductive Labors: 5. The myth of male farming and women's agricultural labor
6. The myth of separate spheres and women's non-agricultural labor
7. Family as privilege: public regulation of non-patriarchal households
8. Motherhood as privilege: patriarchal intervention into women's reproductive labors.

Subject Areas: Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies [JFSL1], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]