Gender, Race, and Rank in a Revolutionary Age: The Georgia Lowcountry, 1750-1820

Abstract

Betty Wood's collection of three essays investigates how intersections of race, gender, and class affected women in the Georgia lowcountry before the antebellum era. Wood points out that many historians (for example, Catherine Clinton, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Deborah Gray White) have investigated other geographic areas or have focused on the antebellum era; they present interpretations based on the situation after the American Revolution and after most slaves had become Christian. Wood believes that those were critical developments in the lives and culture of slaves and that we must push our investigations back further in order to find the origins of their beliefs, ideas, and practices and how they changed over time. She believes this will provide important perspective that can help us better understand competing interpretations by historians. It is a short, impressionistic work, but Wood is essentially successful in her goals. Wood poses the question, how did women of various races and ranks in the lowcountry treat each other before the antebellum era? The first essay looks at enslaved women and free women of color, and, using material from censuses, registers of free people of color, etc., Wood concludes that those two groups of women were no more homogeneous in outlook, imperatives, and behavior toward each other than white women. If female bonding occurred among slaves in the antebellum era, as some historians suggest, then it must have been a new development. Wood stresses instead differentiation in the experience of slave and free African American women. What they did in the marketplace mattered, as did whether women were rural or urban, slave or free, Protestant, Catholic, or something else, and sometimes relations between groups were tense. One should not merely characterize their experiences under the rubric “slave women.” Above all, female bonds never rivaled those with male family members.