Book review
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The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. By Catherine Clinton. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. xix, 331 pp. $19.95.
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Catherine Clinton, a student of both southern history and women's studies, has
attempted to shed light upon the "hidden lives" of southern plantation mistresses,
who, she contends, have been prisoners of myth, legend, and folklore. The Plantation
Mistress strives to fill the gap in the historical literature created by what Clinton calls
the "New Englandization" of American women's history, a development which, she
rightly argues, has obscured and distorted our historical understanding of southern
white women. This book focuses on the elite, that is, women living on plantations
with twenty or more slaves in the seven seaboard states of the plantation South in
the decisive but neglected period between 1780 and 1835. In order to find out how
plantation mistresses lived and to explore the concept of "woman" in southern culture,
Clinton has examined family letters, household inventories, papers of female academies,
wills, physicians' records, commonplace books, unpublished diaries, and memoirs
found in nearly 500 manuscript collections, many of them previously unexamined.
Clinton considers such topics as domestic duties and household management; kinship,
courtship, marriage, and divorce; moral standards; health and childbearing; the
isolation of plantation life; the "curse of slavery" and the "sexual dynamics of slavery."
From the author's perspective, southern women occupied a distinctly unenviable
position with respect to women of the North. Southern women married at a younger
age, had more children, and died earlier, often in childbirth. They were also
burdened with more complex tasks of household management and lived in greater isolation;
thus they had less of a female community to rely upon for emotional support
and organizational activity. Finally, their education was severely restricted by the
demands of the southern patriarchy and the plantation culture. Depression and anxiety
often caused these women to seek relief in laudanum.
Clinton concludes that southern women performed essential and complex functions
on the plantation. In spite of her contention that "relatively little is actually known
of women's work in the ante-bellum South" (p. 7), Clinton has reaffirmed the observations
of Anne Firor Scott and Julia Spruill. More important, however, is her conclusion
concerning the pervasive influence of slavery and the patriarchal ethos in
shaping the lives of southern women. Slavery contributed to the oppression of women:
"Patriarchy was the bedrock upon which the slave society was founded, and slavery
exaggerated the pattern of subjugation that patriarchy had established" (p. 6). No
area of life, from attitudes toward birth control to ideas about women's education to
cultural prescriptions concerning sexual conduct, escaped untouched. Gender and
race thus emerge as critical factors for understanding southern social relations.
The book's predominant theme is the oppression of women, an oppression that
equaled and in some ways exceeded that experienced by slaves. For example, in
examining the coercive power of the cult of the lady, Clinton contends, "These women
were merely prisoners in disguise" (p. 109). Similarly, she observes that the isolation
of plantation life in conjunction with the power of southern slaveholders "ensured
that a woman remained as securely bound to the land as her husband's other property
. . . . Every woman was an island, isolated unto herself" (p. 179). Yet there is
reason to question this picture of the plantation mistress as helpless victim of the
ideology of her culture. Clinton's emphasis on the southern woman's isolation and
lack of autonomy leads to a neglect of the efforts of some southern women to maintain
an independent and viable sphere of activity and expression. But even if Clinton's
controversial conclusions are challenged, the significance of her book remains clear,
it lies in the renewed attention it gives to a neglected topic and in the discussion that it will surely provoke.
Marianne Buroff Sheldon, Mills College
Reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, v.93 no.1 (January 1985)
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