Gender, Race and Family in Nineteenth Century America: From Northern Woman to Plantation Mistress

by Rebecca Fraser

Overview

Sarah Hicks Williams was the northern-born wife of an antebellum slaveholder. Rebecca Fraser traces her journey as she relocates to Clifton Grove, the Williams' slaveholding plantation, presenting her with complex dilemmas as she reconciled her new role as plantation mistress to the gender script she had been raised with in the North.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230300705
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/16/2012
Series:	Genders and Sexualities in History
Edition description:	2013
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

REBECCA FRASER carried out her doctoral work at the University of Warwick, UK. She is currently a lecturer of American History and Culture in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Reading Letters, Telling Stories and Writing History 1

1 "Everything Here is So Different": Changing Cultural Landscapes 15

2 An Identity in Transit: From "True Woman" to "Southern Lady" 41

3 Familial Relations: North and South 71

4 Articulating a Southern Self: Georgia, Sunnyside and the Confederacy 103

5 Reconstructing Southern Womanhood 134

Postscript 160

Notes 167

Bibliography 198

Index 215