Abstract
This paper examines how gender shaped the family of Nancy Hood McGee, who belonged to one of Georgia’s antebellum planter families, across four generations. The McGee family had joined the planter class late in the antebellum period, and after the American Civil War they continued to be prosperous farmers in the former cotton belt. The essay proposes that women in the McGee family played a determining role in the family’s economic success during this time period. As such, it relates to scholarship on women in the nineteenth-century American South as well as to the role of women within southern families. It also serves as a case study on the importance of the female legacy in family history and genealogy that should be studied as a model in similar instances. McGee women became active in agriculture, business, and education. Research focused on records that revealed information about the family’s social and economic development. No diaries and only a few family letters were located, but information transmitted through oral history proved important. Other sources included census records, legal documents such as wills and deeds, newspaper articles, and church records. The research suggested that women in the McGee family played an active role in shaping the family’s development across nearly two centuries. This contrasts with popular images of southern women as weak and delicate, although it corresponds with recent research that has highlighted the accomplishments of nineteenth-century women in the American South. Of particular significance is that women in the McGee family kept a record of accomplishment and achievement across several generations of changing circumstances.
Highlights
Scholars such as Anne Firor Scott, Catherine Clinton, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have examined the role of southern women, white and black, in the nineteenth-century United States from many different perspectives
Research for this study focused on five generations of women in the McGee family
Nancy Hood McGee and her female descendants were able and accomplished southern women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They helped shape the fortunes of the McGee family and the other families into which they married in important ways
Summary
Scholars such as Anne Firor Scott, Catherine Clinton, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have examined the role of southern women, white and black, in the nineteenth-century United States from many different perspectives. The popular images of the dainty “southern belle” and the deferential household slave still survive in the historical imagination, generations of meticulous scholarship have argued that southern women, while they faced legal and societal limitations, found ways of empowering themselves. While these findings have often been based on broad research concentrated within a particular timeframe, especially regarding the southern plantation mistress, they have not often focused on change and continuity within a single family (Scott 1970; Clinton 1992; Clinton 1984; Clinton 1999; Clinton 2000; Fox-Genovese 1988; Rable 1991; Clinton 1995). Oral recollections from descendants show that the legacy of these women and their activities loomed large in how the family history was preserved and transmitted
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