Complementing Catherine Clinton's recent study, The Plantation
Mistress, Prof. Lebsock (History, Rutgers) here examines the
townswomen of antebellum Petersburg, Va. More dutiful than highly
original, her analysis of letters, diaries, and official town
records addresses several ongoing historical debates - central
among them, the question of women's status. For Lebsock, her
townswomen's activities demonstrate that "Positive change in the
status of women can occur when no organized feminism is present."
Hardly much of an argument. Commercial Petersburg was by 1860
Virginia's second largest city; half of its 18,000 residents were
black, and one-third of these were free. Status was based largely
on property, and marriage was seen in substantial part as an
economic arrangement. While women gained some economic autonomy by
maintaining separate estates, husbands still exercised varying
degrees of power over wives and their property. "The only sure way
to escape the legal bondage of marriage was to stay away from
marriage altogether." Increasing numbers of women, black and white,
did just that. Single white women of property, spinsters and
widows, exercised the same legal options as men but were guided by
different values, here summed up as "personalism." They rewarded
favorite slaves and distributed property unequally among their
heirs. Lebsock agrees with Clinton that the Southern woman spent
much of her time engaged in productive household labor; her
townswomen, however, also engaged in a variety of paid employments:
factory work, midwifery, teaching millinery and dressmaking,
grocery retailing, keeping inns and boardinghouses, and
prostitution. For many, the effort at paid employment ended in
poverty. More privileged women responded by erecting charitable
concerus - a Female Orphan Asylum, a House of Industry - which in
due time were taken over by men, much as women's business efforts
had been. Overall, then, Lebsock uncovers a mixed record for the
free women of Petersburg: "Neither a permanent retreat into a
separate sphere nor a steady march from the confines of the home to
the riskier and more varied regions the nineteenth century called
'the world.'" Another addition to a growing list of studies in
women's history, with due and necessary attention to time and
setting: here, interesting historical information; involuted and
unimaginative analysis. (Kirkus Reviews)
Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
In this book, which has important implications for our vision of the female past, Suzanne Lebsock examines the question, Did the position of women in America deteriorate or improve in the first half of the nineteenth century?
Focusing on Petersburg, Virginia, Professor Lebsock is able to demonstrate and explain how the status of women could change for the better in an antifeminist environment. She weaves the experiences of individual women together with general social trends, to show, for example, how women's lives were changing in response to the economy and the institutions of property ownership and slavery.
By looking at what the Petersburg women did and thought and comparing their behavior with that of men, Lebsock discovers that they placed high value on economic security, on the personal, on the religious, and on the interests of other women. In a society committed to materialism, male dominance, and the maintenance of slavery, their influence was subversive. They operated from an alternative value system, indeed a distinct female culture.
"Suzanne Lebsock's careful and precisely crafted study is a major contribution to American women's history. Her comprehensive analysis of one community during a key transitional period sheds new light on such important subjects as women's legal status, their work lives inside and outside the home, and the differing experience of black and white women. Her intelligence and hard work show on every page." —Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University
"This is one of those rare books which breaks new ground. Southern urban women, black and white, in the antebellum years were different from their plantation counterparts, but Suzanne Lebsock is the first historian to find a way to examine their life experience in illuminating detail." —Anne Firor Scott, Duke University
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