[books 2010] Southern (US) History
Jan. 24th, 2010 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro5. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
It's been a long time since I read a proper academic history book where the endnotes and bibliography cover almost as much space as the main text. I bought this book thinking it would be a description of the lives of slave and slave owning women, which it is in part (and less so about poor white women, but the sources are very scarce).
There's also a lot of conceptual stuff and the first chapter is political economy, examining whether the Souther economy can properly described as a capitalist one (conclusion: no but it was inextricably connected with the emerging capitalist economies of the North and Western Europe).
In the rest of the English-speaking world, the domestic was being idealized, but in the South being a lady was more important than domestic things. Fox-Genovese posits that this is a effect of the upper classes having slaves to do everything for them, and consequently placing no value on hard work. Which is why it was surprising, when I got to the chapter on reading, to find that literate Southerners, male and female, were much better read, in more difficult subjects, than you would expect in a society that didn't value work or education very much.
Fox-Genovese makes a compelling argument for the exceptionalism of antebellum slave society which I accept but leaves me asking if there are any comparisons with Brazil, where slavery ended even later (1888 springs to mind but I'm too lazy to look it up)[1]. Possibly it doesn't count as an emerging capitalist society though.
So, yes, full of ideas as well as descriptions; fascinating all the way through. This is yet another review where I'm too inarticulate to do the book justice. I'm really glad I read this.
[1] Last time I had a question like that I started a PhD. I know better now.
It's been a long time since I read a proper academic history book where the endnotes and bibliography cover almost as much space as the main text. I bought this book thinking it would be a description of the lives of slave and slave owning women, which it is in part (and less so about poor white women, but the sources are very scarce).
There's also a lot of conceptual stuff and the first chapter is political economy, examining whether the Souther economy can properly described as a capitalist one (conclusion: no but it was inextricably connected with the emerging capitalist economies of the North and Western Europe).
In the rest of the English-speaking world, the domestic was being idealized, but in the South being a lady was more important than domestic things. Fox-Genovese posits that this is a effect of the upper classes having slaves to do everything for them, and consequently placing no value on hard work. Which is why it was surprising, when I got to the chapter on reading, to find that literate Southerners, male and female, were much better read, in more difficult subjects, than you would expect in a society that didn't value work or education very much.
Fox-Genovese makes a compelling argument for the exceptionalism of antebellum slave society which I accept but leaves me asking if there are any comparisons with Brazil, where slavery ended even later (1888 springs to mind but I'm too lazy to look it up)[1]. Possibly it doesn't count as an emerging capitalist society though.
So, yes, full of ideas as well as descriptions; fascinating all the way through. This is yet another review where I'm too inarticulate to do the book justice. I'm really glad I read this.
[1] Last time I had a question like that I started a PhD. I know better now.
