Although historians over the past two decades have written
extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they
have largely neglected the world of the working woman.
Neither
Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to
examine the lives and labors of ordinary southern women--white,
free black, and Indian.
Contributors to this volume illuminate women's involvement in the
southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays
explore the working lives of a wide range of women--nuns and
prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic
servants--in urban and rural settings across the antebellum South.
By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially
acknowledged and "invisible" work within the context of cultural
attitudes regarding women's proper place in society, the book sheds
new light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race,
class, and gender in the modernizing South.
The contributors are E. Susan Barber, Bess Beatty, Emily Bingham,
James Taylor Carson, Emily Clark, Stephanie Cole, Susanna Delfino,
Michele Gillespie, Sarah Hill, Barbara J. Howe, Timothy J. Lockley,
Stephanie McCurry, Diane Batts Morrow, and Penny L. Richards.