“elizabeth fox genovese”

Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues th... More

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was at the beginning of the long struggle for women's rights in the United States. The documents collected in this anthology bring to life the anger and the excitement of a moment when a small but determined group of women dared to challenge the laws and customs o... More

"Hague's memoir provides a rare glimpse, from a woman's perspcetive, of the full activities of a slaveholding household. . . . [It] skillfully constructs an image of elite southern whites as, in essential ways, very much like their northern peers: industrious, resourceful, devoted to their families,... More

Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit--the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to hold men to collective social standards, including res... More

In May 1997, a group of distinguished historians announced the formation of the Historical Society, an organization that sought to be free of the jargon-laden debates and political agendas that have come to characterize the profession. Eugene Genovese, Prsident of the Society, explained the commitme... More

Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives ... More

Presenting many slaveholders as intelligent, honorable and pious men and women, this study asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that inflicted gross abuse on slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in tra... More

Southern Mothers, a collection of critical essays by prominent southern literary scholars, examines the significance of motherhood in southern fiction. The belle, the mammy, religion, and racism are several of the distinctive threads with which southern women writers have woven the fabric of their s... More