Unruly Women

The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South

Victoria E. Bynum

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780807843611, 9780807820162
• eBook ISBN: 9781469616995
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates “unruly” women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analyzing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences and behavior reflected and influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state and region. Her work expands our knowledge of black and white women by studying them outside the plantation setting.

Bynum searched local and state court records, public documents, and manuscript collections to locate and document the lives of these otherwise ordinary, obscure women. Some appeared in court as abused, sometimes abusive, wives, as victims and sometimes perpetrators of violent assaults, or as participants in ilicit, interracial relationships. During the Civil War, women freqently were cited for theft, trespassing, or rioting, usually in an effort to gain goods made scarce by war. Some women were charged with harboring evaders or deserters of the Confederacy, an act that reflected their conviction that the Confederacy was destroying them.

These politically powerless unruly women threatened to disrupt the underlying social structure of the Old South, which depended on the services and cooperation of all women. Bynum examines the effects of women’s social and sexual behavior on the dominant society and shows the ways in which power flowed between private and public spheres. Whether wives or unmarried, enslaved or free, women were active agents of the society’s ordering and dissolution.

Notes

Introduction

1. For gender analyses of the relationship between deviancy and social control, see especially Rodmell, “Men, Women and Sexuality”; D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, pp. 39–52; Stansell, City of Women, pp. 171–92; Jowkar, “Honor and Shame”; Schur, Labeling Women Deviant; Ross and Rapp, “Sex and Society”; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Smart and Smart, eds., Women, Sexuality, and Social Control; Fox, “Nice Girl”; Douglas, Purity and Danger.

2. See Kerber, “Separate Spheres.”

3. Hindus, Prison and Plantation; Tushnet, American Law of Slavery; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice. For a study of nineteenth-century law that analyzes gender, see Bardaglio, “An Outrage upon Nature.” On slave law in Virginia, see Schwarz, Twice Condemned.

4. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, p. 300. For evidence that women made gains in property rights under this judicial patriarchy, see Salmon, Women and the Law of Property; and Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg.

5. Rose, In Slavery and Freedom, p. 98; Brittan and Maynard, Sexism, Racism, and Oppression, p. 212. For an excellent discussion of the need to redefine power from the perspective of the oppressed, see hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 83. See also Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 230; and Lerner, “Reconceptualizing Differences among Women.”

6. Gordon, “What’s New in Women’s History” and Heroes of Their Own Lives.

7. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Blassingame, Slave Community; Gutman, Black Family; Levine, Black Culture; Escott, Slavery Remembered; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk. See Harris, “Flowering of Afro-American History,” for a fuller treatment of the earliest historiography of slavery.

8. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, provides a full treatment of the southern system of honor. See also Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, pp. 9—33; and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, passim.

9. For different interpretations of southern paternalism, see especially Gen- ovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Gutman, Black Family; and Faust, Sacred Circle. See Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, for a discussion of southern law, slavery, and paternalism.

10. See especially Blassingame, Slave Community; Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”; Gutman, Black Family; Escott, Slavery Remembered; Jones, Labor of Love; Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup; Levine, Black Culture; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Farnham, “Sapphire?”; Joyner, Down by the Riverside; Stuckey, Slave Culture. Many scholars have come under fire for having exaggerated the degree of autonomy in the nineteenth-century slave community. See, for example, Kolchin, “Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community.” For a recent, more critical assessment of the impact of slavery on black males, see Wyatt-Brown, “Mask of Obedience.”

11. Aptheker, Woman’s Legacy; Davis, Women, Race, and Class; hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?; Giddings, When and Where I Enter; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Jones, Labor of Love; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household. For a pioneer work on race and gender in the slave community, see Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”

12. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” p. 9; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pp. 33–55; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, pp. 77–80, 27–61; Fox-Genovese, “Strategies and Forms of Resistance,” pp. 157–59. See also Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, pp. 291–92.

13. Davis, “The Role of the Black Woman in the Community of Slaves,” pp. 12—13. See also hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?, p. 29. For graphic representations of the sexual oppression of black women, see Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Murray, Proud Shoes. On rape and miscegenation in the antebellum South, see Clinton, “Southern Dishonor.”

14. On racism in the North, see especially Litwack, North of Slavery; and White, “‘We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings.’” For a discussion of northern sexism and racism, see Berthoff, “Conventional Mentality”; and Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 32—35.

15. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, pp. 56—57. The most comprehensive treatment of southern free blacks is Berlin, Slaves without Masters. See also Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, pp. 63–89; Burton, In My Father’s House, pp. 202–24; Schweninger, “Prosperous Blacks in the South.”

16. Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, pp. 88–103. On free black women as property owners, see also Schweninger, “Property-Owning Free African-American Women”; and Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, pp. 228–29.

17. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, p. 88. See also Watson, Jacksonian Politics, pp. 43—44; and Burton, In My Father’s House, pp. 47–57.

18. Long, Son of Carolina, p. 47. On upper-class perceptions of poor whites, see Ash, “Poor Whites in the Occupied South”; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 46. Evidence that many slaves held poor whites and free blacks in contempt is scattered throughout the WPA ex-slave narratives in Rawick, ed., American Slave. See also Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 276, 306–7.

19. Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, p. 276. James H. Hammond, a South Carolina slaveholder, also remarked that “somehow—God forgive—I could never bear poor girls. When pretty and pure spirited I pitied but nevertheless avoided them” (quoted in Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 200). Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, p. 246, notes that poor white women in North Carolina refused almost all but domestic work, despite low wages, because of the disgrace of public work.

20. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, p. 238. For a fuller treatment of the role of yeoman women in the southern household economy, see McCurry, “Defense of Their World.”

21. Dublin, Women at Work; Stansell, City of Women, p. 100. In contrast, the employment of white women in the antebellum cotton mills of the North Carolina Piedmont apparently did not enhance the status of working white women. See Watson, Jacksonian Politics, pp. 43–44; Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, p. 247; and Kenzer, Kinship and Neighborhood, p. 30.

22. Carlton, “Revolution from Above”; Escott, Many Excellent People; O’Brien, Legal Fraternity; Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina; Calhoon, Religion and the American Revolution in North Carolina. Many southern agricultural presses also extolled the virtues of the busy farm wife. See Bardolph, “North Carolina Farm Journal”; and Hagler, “Ideal Woman in the Antebellum South.”

23. Welter, “Cult of True Womanhood”; Friedman, Enclosed Garden; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, pp. 43—44.

24. See especially Welter, “Cult of True Womanhood”; Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual”; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood; Sklar, Catharine Beecher; Epstein, Politics of Domesticity; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class. On the southern cult of ladyhood, see Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 145—76; Scott, Southern Lady; Clinton, Plantation Mistress; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household.

25. Scott, Southern Lady; Clinton, Plantation Mistress. For Fox-Genovese’s analysis of the shaping of gender in slaveholding and nonslaveholding households, see Within the Plantation Household, pp. 38–99. Stephanie McCurry’s “Defense of Their World” also finds that yeoman and planter households in South Carolina were governed by similar principles.

26. Quoted in Faust, ed., Ideology of Slavery, p. 78. See Douglas, Purity and Danger, for an analysis of the connections between systems of honor and sexual purity. For effects of the Jezebel stereotype on black women, see White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, pp. 30—46; Jones, ‘“My Mother Was Much of a Woman”’; Jennings, ‘“Us Colored Women Had to Go through a Plenty.’”

27. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, p. xvii.

28. Fox-Genovese, “Strategies and Forms of Resistance,” p. 144.

29. On women’s marginality, see Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct. For works that illumina...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Race, Class, and Gender in Three Piedmont Counties
• Two White Womanhood, Black Womanhood: Ideals and Realities in a Piedmont Slaveholding Society
• Three The Limits of Paternalism: Property, Divorce, and Domestic Relations
• Four Punishing Deviant Women: The State as Patriarch
• Five The Struggle to Survive: The Lives of Slave, Free Black, and Poor White Women during the Civil War
• Six “The Women Is as Bad as the Men”: Women’s Participation in the Inner Civil War
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index