Out of the House of Bondage The Transformation of the Plantation Household [Hardcover]

Glymph challenges popular depictions of mistresses as 'friends' and 'allies' of slaves in the plantation household.This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery, and Glymph challenges previous depictions of mistresses as friends and allies of slaves.This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery, and Glymph challenges previous depictions of mistresses as friends and allies of slaves.This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as friends and allies of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal.1. The gender of violence; 2. 'Beyond the limits of decency': women in slavery; 3. Making 'better girls': Southern women and the claims of domesticity; 4. 'Nothing but deception in them': the war within; 5. Out of the house of bondage: a sundering of ties, 18656; 6. 'A makeshift kind of life': free women and free homes; 7. 'Wild notions of right and wrong': from home to the streets.The intellectually sophisticated and analytically acute Thavolia Glymph compels serious reconsideration of the transition in the relations of southern black and white women. Sensitive to the painful circumstances of bothl,