The Plantation Mistress
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This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master.
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"The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions — the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.
Liked The Plantation Mistress? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked The Plantation Mistress. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
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Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South Shares history, nonfiction, American history -
A Year in the South: 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History Shares history, nonfiction, American history -
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War Shares history, civil war, nonfiction -
Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 Shares history, southern history, civil war
