Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South

Abstract

Neither Lady Nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. i, 324. Tables. Cloth $55.00; paper, $19.95.)This collection of thirteen essays proves that thousands of southern women who were neither lady nor slave worked in sophisticated ways to promote the well-being of their families and communities. Neither Lady nor Slave promises to direct Southern women's history in significant new directions by exploring ordinary women's working (1). This book fulfills its promise. The well-written and thoroughly researched essays focus on a variety of women who normally are left out of southern history.The workers studied are a diverse group, including Native Americans, mill workers, teachers, domestics, prostitutes, and nuns. Despite variations of race, class, and profession, those studied managed to negotiate the market economy of the antebellum South. Two essays on Native-American women showed that they could operate in a capitalistic market economy and still maintain cultural traditions and older forms of production. After the Indian removal of the 1830s, basket making and selling was necessary for the family's survival. Another essay on the lives of yeoman farmers in South Carolina found that white females of all ages worked in the fields. Their contribution of female field-labor (which was often hidden from the public) combined with the creation of subsistence and market goods to give the yeoman farmer his treasured independence. A group of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans were more enterprising and economically independent than many of their married counterparts. This order of nuns used teaching, nursing, and other service activities to achieve financial autonomy. As slave owners, they imposed Catholic moral attitudes on the sexual and marital behavior of their slaves. Another theme, which runs through most of the selections, is the importance of class, race, age, and ethnicity to the type of work southern women pursued. A study of domestics based mostly on newspaper advertisements in border cities finds that demographic characteristics influenced employers' wishes for nurses, cooks, and general house servants. Another study of working women in Savannah shows that a number of complex variables beyond race and class such as age, ethnicity, and family background determined the type of work women performed. The last section of the book highlights women's work in the industrial sector of the South. These essays show women challenging and resisting traditional views toward labor and a surprising degree of interracial relations in the factories and mines.The medium of collected essays by a variety of authors gives the book the depth a case study of a single city would not. …