Family Values in the Old South , and: Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Family Values in the Old South. Edited by Craig Thompson Friend and Anya Jabour. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. vii, 257 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8130-3418-8. Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South. By John Mayfield. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. xxviii, 173 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8130-3337-2. Patriarchy was central to antebellum southern society, an integral part of the hierarchy that made slavery possible. Yet as these two works demonstrate , both patriarchy and masculinity were open to challenge, and white men were never as secure in their mastery as they boasted. In the ten essays in Family Values in the Old South, contributors collectively explore the power and limitations of the patriarchal ideal, as well as the distinctiveness of southern families. Reflecting recent scholarship on the southern middle class as well as women and gender in America, this collection is introduced by a thoughtful reflection on the role of family values in historical and historiographic conceptions of the South and America’s larger political rhetoric. Although new ideas of domesticity began to shape the expectations of southern families, many southern women continued to provide critical labor for family enterprises. The production of clothing for slaves and family members remained one such task, as Lynn Kennedy argues, and it was one on which the operation of the plantation and the social success of elite families depended. Likewise, elite women might manage plantations during their husbands’ frequent absences, as Nikki Berg Burin’s study of Ann and Richard Archer demonstrates. Such responsibilities, encouraged by new ideas of companionate marriage, were seen as part of a wife’s domestic duties rather than a challenge to her husband’s authority . Yet if shared managerial interests bound spouses together, the strains of absence “often created a climate of distrust, loneliness, and general unhappiness within their marriages” (p. 135). Challenges to masculine authority became public in the homes of families who ran the South’s hostelries, as Kirsten E. Wood’s innovative use of travelers’ accounts demonstrates. Travelers evaluated the domestic comforts of inns and taverns where they lodged; thus women’s labor, increasingly hidden in bourgeois households, contributed directly to tavern families’ incomes and the reputations of their establishments. At the April 2011 169 same time, an innkeeper’s authority could be undercut by evidence of slave resistance or by his own appearance of obsequiousness in serving guests. Other forms of southern family further challenged, but ultimately did not subvert, patriarchal authority. Nancy Zey finds that elite women in the lower Mississippi Valley extended the meaning of family to encompass the inmates of orphan asylums. Like female reformers elsewhere, these women justified their public activities as an extension of their domestic responsibilities. They were thus able to usurp men’s roles in institutional management without challenging the patriarchy itself. Anya Jabour concludes that southern women who formed same-sex romantic attachments, and were sometimes able to sustain relationships over many years (sometimes supporting themselves by teaching), likewise ultimately either entered into heterosexual unions or joined the households of natal family members. There appears to have been no space in the patriarchal South for female families. Through networks of kinship, powerful families dominated local politics. Studying subdistrict voting records in Mississippi, Christopher J. Olsen finds that while organized parties began to shape politics elsewhere in the nation, individual rural neighborhoods, bound together by kinship and other close ties, showed near-unanimity in voting for their home candidates. Elections were often held at the homes of prominent planters and managed by members of well-known families, thus reinforcing patriarchal authority over entire precincts. His findings support recent conclusions by Edward Baptist and Carolyn Billingsley on the importance of kinship on the cotton frontier [Creating an Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), and ­ Communities of Kinship (Athens, GA, 2004)]. Despite slavery’s centrality to southern ideas of “our family, black and white,” only two of these essays focus primarily on enslaved and interracial families. Studying cross-plantation marriages, Emily West argues against both the Stampp/Moynihan theory of weak marriages and absent black fathers and Deborah Gray White’s Aren’t I a...