Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South

Marie S. Molloy

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781611178708
• eBook ISBN: 9781611178715
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

A broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in the slaveholding South

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South investigates the lives of unmarried white women—from the pre- to the post-Civil War South—within a society that placed high value on women's marriage and motherhood. Marie S. Molloy examines female singleness to incorporate non-marriage, widowhood, separation, and divorce. These single women were not subject to the laws and customs of coverture, in which females were covered or subject to the governance of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and therefore lived with greater autonomy than married women.

Molloy contends that the Civil War proved a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes for these women. Being a single woman during this time often meant living a nuanced life, operating within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions while manipulating them to greater advantage. Singleness was often a route to autonomy and independence that over time expanded and reshaped traditional ideals of southern womanhood.

Molloy delves into these themes and their effects through the lens of the various facets of the female life: femininity, family, work, friendship, law, and property. By examining letters and diaries of more than three hundred white, native-born, southern women, Molloy creates a broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in both the urban and plantation slaveholding South. She concludes that these women were, in various ways, pioneers and participants of a slow, but definite process of change in the antebellum era.

Chapter 1 THE CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH

On 2 December 1829, Mary Telfair, a well-to-do spinster from Savannah, Georgia, wrote a letter to her lifelong friend Mary Few on the topic of single blessedness. In her analysis of the single state she made two important observations. First, “a married woman is always of more consequence than a single one.”¹ Second, for a single woman to manage on her own “it requires a vast deal of independence and a variety of resources.”² Yet for Mary Telfair these issues did not prevent her from choosing to remain single. Since she came from one of the richest and most privileged slaveholding families in Georgia, it seems fair to deduce that her experience of single blessedness was colored by her social, racial, and class position as a southern lady.³ Mary was careful to be seen to uphold the tenets of true womanhood and openly admitted that marriage remained the most desirable status for a woman. At the same time the mere fact that she chose to remain single displayed a covert resistance, by consciously rejecting marriage and motherhood in her own life.⁴

As Mary Telfair’s example attests, the construction of femininity in the Old South had already begun a gradual process of change long before the Civil War. This is reflected in the fact that women from the highest echelons of society were consciously choosing a life of single blessedness in the antebellum period. Mary claimed that the Telfair family was devoted to “single blessedness.” Therefore, her decision to reject marriage, and with it the opportunity to fulfill the tenets of true womanhood, had begun in the 1820s. Her comments reveal much about southern women’s perceptions of femininity as defined by the society in which they lived.⁵

The boundaries of true womanhood were far less rigid than they were often perceived to be.⁶ Single women often upheld marriage and motherhood as the hallmark of femininity, but this was predominately as a means to gain social acceptance in southern society, which in turn cultivated the soil for single blessedness to blossom. This in turn provided single women with a route to greater autonomy.⁷

The Antebellum Setting: Cult and Reality

As early as the 1800s, the South had metamorphosed into a distinct region characterized by plantations, cotton, and black slavery.⁸ It was a vast geographical area that spread from the upper states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee down to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia (the Lower South). The South was dominated by its agriculture and defined by its slaves who worked on the land. It was also characterized by class, and the stratification of labor meant that all white men, regardless of their wealth, rank, or class, were higher up the social hierarchy. The existence of slavery was therefore crucial as it bound together different social groups and elevated all white people above their enslaved property, in a racial hierarchy distinctive to the South.⁹

Within this complex web of southern social relations stood the figure of the ideal “southern lady.” She was both a myth and a reality, but often the two did not match up. The southern lady was a distilled version of the Cult of True Womanhood in the sense that she held a cultural capital unlike any other southern woman.¹⁰ Anne Firor Scott argued this was fundamentally linked to the fact that the South was a slave society, and “because they owned slaves and thus maintained a traditional landowning aristocracy, southerners tenaciously held on to the patriarchal structure,” which included their vision of southern womanhood, which pinned ladyhood at its proverbial core.¹¹ The experience of planter women contrasted sharply with many other groups of southern women (black slaves, the lower class, frontier women) who could never hope to attain its high standards, either because of their racial or class position. Whereas slave women “answered to a master who was not of their natural family, class or race,” the southern lady was firmly under the control of male family members (her father, husband, or son), which made her in a sense, compliant in her subordination.

Historians such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have suggested that planter women accepted their subordination in the southern hegemony because they were bound to a patriarchal society in a way that black women were not.¹² In other words elite women had a vested interest in protecting the institution of slavery because it elevated their own status above black women and lower-class white women and gave them a degree of power and authority albeit within the limitations of their gender. Likewise single, slaveholding women replicated class, race, and gender hierarchies in the way they conducted their lives. They were keen to demonstrate their deference to the broader patriarchy of the South in the hope of gaining acceptance from their family and from society in general, which inadvertently led to a greater degree of autonomy. Planter-class women subscribed to the same conservative worldview as white men, and they often replicated existing hierarchies by accepting their own subordination within the patriarchal order.¹³ Women were taught to accept their subordination as wives and mothers in light of their racial (and for slaveholding women, class) “superiority” over black people.

Slaveholding women in particular had a vested interest in upholding slavery, owing to their unique role in southern society as southern ladies, which upheld them as paragons of moral virtue and ideal womanhood. For women within the slaveholding class or for other elite women who were beneficiaries of slavery in port cities such as Charleston or Savannah, the roles and expectations of them—as southern ladies—were heightened with their elevated social status. The ideal of the southern lady “constituted the highest condition to which women could aspire to,” and consequently the pressure for them to attain the feminine standard of perfection was intense.¹⁴ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese noted, “the activities of even the most prestigious lady remained carefully circumscribed by the conventions ordained for women in general, and southern culture placed a premium on her meeting the responsibility in accordance with her station.”¹⁵ Therefore, for women who were single, the same pressure to conform to a standard that did not really fit them must have been just as intense, which led many women to show an outward veneer of acceptance of their “required” gender roles. This pressure to conform came in various different guises: from institutions (such as the church and schools), from family and community, and in the form of the printed press (magazines and advice literature). Women could not escape the powerful rhetoric of their community and embedded in institutions, which led to internal conflicts, as women—both married and single—wrestled with their own conceptions of themselves (and for their desire for autonomy), with the competing need to fit in with societal stereotypes of nineteenth-century womanhood.¹⁶ As Reverend T. Carleton Henry of Charleston reiterated, even women without husbands were answerable to the overarching patriarchy of the South, inculcated in his firm warning that “if there be neither husband nor father to complain, community will.”¹⁷

There was a disjuncture between the myth of ideal womanhood and the reality of women’s everyday life as a means to understand how female singleness fitted into nineteenth-century ideals of femininity. The Cult of True Womanhood was a social construct that encouraged and inspired middle-to-upper-class white women to fulfill certain models of femininity, based on marriage, motherhood, and domesticity.¹⁸ It had particular resonance for the upper class, who were seen as the exemplars of ideal womanhood, connected to their elevated racial and class position. The Cult of True Womanhood had a strong racial and class bias that was particularly marked in the South because of slavery. Not all women fitted into the mold of nineteenth-century ideal womanhood that was so heavily emphasized and encouraged in the South.¹⁹ Yet women were continually exposed to societal demands to construct, and then control, their femininity. The four “cardinal virtues” of True Womanhood were piety, purity, submissiveness, and of course, domesticity. The church was intent in instilling piety in their female congregation, and “women were encouraged to find solace in religion,” but not power.²⁰ There was generally a fear of powerful women in the church, with ministers who spoke out “against women usurping men’s place in religious service” or against those who threatened to move from “pew to pulpit.”²¹ Piety was more about “effect[ing] conversions among family members” and “bolstering [female] endurance,” which “aided them to achieve self-discipline”—a further institutional tool utilized to control women.²²

Religion was seen as a central “lynchpin” and effective “means of self-control” designed to guide women through the trials and tribulations of life; it also represented a means of social control over women.²³ On the one hand religion provided women an escape from the drudgeries of their daily lives, with the promise of a glorious afterlife, but on the other it limited women from exercising autonomy. For example Laura Comer, the ever-complaining widow from Columbus, Georgia, regularly recorded her religious sentiments in her diary, which spanned the 1860s to the late 1890s. Comer referred repeatedly to the terrible sufferings she endured throughout her earthly life and looked to God for strength, describing herself as “weak, helpless and in distress.”²⁴ Frequently preoccupied by thoughts of death and the promise of salvation in the afterlife, Comer displayed a general malaise and dissatisfaction with her life. In the post–Civil War period, she chronicled her intolerance with “free negroes,” whom she dubbed “indolent” and “perplexing,” presumably because she could not control them in the way she wanted to, and she found she lacked the authority of her late husband.²⁵ Following James Comer’s death in 1864 (which it must be noted ended a deeply unhappy marriage), Laura Comer turned to God for protection. “O Lord, what wilt thou have me do? Of myself I am nothing, only as God invites, directs and enlightens and strengthens me,” she wrote in 1867, adding, “I am done with earthly friendships and loves! I shudder and shrink from assuming any responsibilities. My only hope now hangs in faith I have in God’s promises.”²⁶ The case of Laura Comer makes a wider conjectural point about single women, who were caught in a conundrum. On the one hand they drew strength from God, but on the other they were curtailed by their devotion to organized religion, which was ultimately controlled by men, who preyed on female insecurities.²⁷

Charleston’s Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy are a good illustration of this point, as they were manipulated and controlled by a figure of male authority within the church. The story as it is retold describes how the Sisters of Charity, under the directive of a Santo Domingan refugee Julia Datty, established an independent school for young ladies, which was thriving as an independently run entity under South Carolina law.²⁸ After Datty’s death “the sisters were dismayed” when the bishop, John England, “ordered [them] to curtail their educational efforts” despite the school’s independent status and their volition to continue running the educational establishment as they had done previously.²⁹ Yet their voices were silenced by Bishop John England as a dominant figure of male authority within the church, who was able to demand female submission and eliminate their free will. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that southern women began to exercise greater control and autonomy in organized religion.

Likewise, in the field of education, women were both entrapped and empowered. This dichotomy was tied to the fact that education for women was “carefully refined and adapted to mirror existing traditional values,” and “nineteenth-century southern schools were in reality extensions of the home, which meant education was yet another means of family control.”³⁰ Education for women was therefore encouraged within a very specific context. Friedman argued that in spite of this context “education contributed to southern women’s self-confidence and a more positive self-image,” as young ladies also realized the power of education in promoting future independent living.³¹ Minnie Hooper, from Charleston, South Carolina, adorned her father with gratitude for agreeing to continue paying for her education, as it enabled her the opportunity “to earn a subsistence” and “to be independent and to cease to be a burden” later in life.³²

In the Civil War and postwar periods, young southern girls continued to value a good education. Julia Tutwiler, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1841, spoke with deep regret when her father suspended her education when she was seventeen years old. In writing to her sister Ida Tutwiler some years later in 1872, she confessed how much she regretted that her formal education had ceased so prematurely. She readily admitted: “I hated to put father to more expense [in educating me].… I did not know … what a large income Father had [at the time], and what an excellent investment of it he would make giving opportunities for cultivation to one of his children who would make use of every minute with enthusiasm.”³³ Yet she later admitted, “I have missed and needed that systematic and thorough teaching that is given in boys colleges.… I could not exaggerate the need I have had for this training and the trouble I have had for want of it.”³⁴ While this did not prevent her from achieving considerable success as an educational (and prison) reformer, it clearly highlights the correlation between knowledge and power—power in the sense of autonomy and freedom from the shackles of dependence on others. The role of institutions, and the messages that they embodied in southern society, therefore had the ability to shape southern women’s identity, regardless of their marital status.

In nineteenth-century women’s magazines and prescriptive literature, women were praised for being weak, timid, “dependent,” and frail. The Young Ladies Book summarized the passive virtues of a good woman, which included “a spirit of obedience, … submission,” “pliability of temper,” and “humility of mind.” Godey’s Ladies Book emphasized “wifely duties and childcare” and said women had to ensure the home was a “cheerful, peaceful place” to keep men satisfied and away from outside temptation....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Construction of Femininity in the Antebellum South
• Chapter 2 Single Women and the Southern Family
• Chapter 3 Work
• Chapter 4 Female Friendship
• Chapter 5 Law, Property, and the Single Woman
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index