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Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880. By Marli F. Weiner. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Pp, xii, 308. Cloth, $45.95. Paper, $19.95.)
In Mistresses and Slaves, Marli F. Weiner explores the contradictory implications of race and gender in a slaveholding society. Using WPA interviews with former slaves, planter family papers, and travelers' accounts, she reveals the way in which mistresses and slaves in plantation South Carolina searched for "a middle ground between the two extremes" of differences based on race and similarities based on gender. Ultimately, she argues, "women's potential to identify common ground across racial lines offered the possibility of transcending slavery and viewing one another as individuals," with "subversive, even radical implications" (2) for South Carolina's plantation women.
Mistresses and Slaves is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores women's work lives in antebellum South Carolina, establishing the preconditions for plantation women's tentative steps toward a common identity. Weiner reveals that gender was central in determining work for both mistresses and slaves. By demonstrating that even female field hands engaged in domestic production under the mistress's supervision, Weiner expands the scope of slave-mistress interactions to include all female slaves rather than only those slave women permanently assigned to the Big House. "Working closely together in an environment that defined gender distinctions as almost as significant as racial ones, mistresses and slaves were constantly forced to confront both their similarities and their differences" (50).
In Part 2, Weiner turns to the interplay of domestic ideology and daily interactions in plantation women's lives before the Civil War. Inspired by what Weiner terms a "uniquely southern ideology of domesticity" (57), plantation mistresses aspired to treat the slaves in their charge with benevolence and charity. Slaveholding women's special mission...