Reconstructing the Household
Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South
Peter W. Bardaglio
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/2000
Pages: 382
Subject: History, Law, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807860212
DESCRIPTION
In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines
the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the
nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape,
incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners
struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within
their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War
era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's
analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans,
women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families,
sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a
distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on
hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic
relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power
structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North,
which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual
obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and
economic change transformed family law and the governance of
sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of
the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite
these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional
notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal
attitudes.
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