Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865 (review)

Abstract

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in Urban South, 1800-1865. By Christine Jacobson Carter. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. x, 200. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.)In An Evening When Alone (1993), historian Michael O'Brien called for more systematic study of antebellum South's single women. The assumed centrality of plantation mistress, he implied, had drawn attention away from her more numerous sisters-middle- and lower-class women, urban women, slave women, unruly women, and fallen women among them. Single women, he felt, had been particularly overlooked, and it was lacuna he began to fill with his edited collection of four journals of single women in South. Though desire for independence deserves consideration as among [these] journals' more consistent topics, O'Brien noted in his introduction, perhaps their theme . . . is loneliness, its presence and looming persistence (6).Thirteen years later, O'Brien's call for more systematic study has been (partly) answered by Christine Jacobson Carter. In her examination of affluent, single white women of antebellum Savannah and Charleston, however, Carter stresses different predominant theme: usefulness, she claims, not loneliness, circumscribed and gave meaning to these women's lives. In urban centers of South, elite unmarried women socialized, volunteered, churched, and traveled together (9). They were reserve army of paternalism, plugging holes in nuclear families, stitching up South's social fabric, and propping up its many fictions, even those that caged them.Carter is quick to admit that Savannah and Charleston were atypical, if not unique. Plugged into a wider seaboard of letters and ideas, these coastal towns trafficked in Northern notions of domesticity that be practiced outside home (41). In South's urban enclaves, single women were not denigrated as unchosen ones, flawed and deficient (43). Instead they were allowed, even encouraged, to play more vital social roles. Carter is sensitive to fact that although they were intertwined with North, these Southern cities were also instruments of greater plantation culture (51). In South, man's mastery, unquestioned and unquestionable, relied on natural and reinforcing dependency of his wife, children, and slaves.How then woman be single and natural? How she play an independent social role without undermining South's social dependencies? Only through usefulness to others, Carter concludes, could unmarried women save themselves from long-held stereotype of pathetic, barren, cold, and crotchety old maid (47). Thus, South's single women had to walk thin line. Selfishness of any kind was abhorrent; it was Northern, threat, and it brought stinging rebuke. A single woman help raise her sister's children; she sing praises of her brother and father; she sing sweetly in church and feed poor, but she not venture too far. She had to remain within the bounds of southern womanhood, which may have expected marriage and motherhood but demanded piety, dependence, and service to others (66). …