Volume 35, Number 19 · December 8, 1988
Slaves and Mistresses
By C. Vann Woodward
Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
University of North Carolina Press, 544 pp., $12.95 (paper)
It would be impossible to find women who knew more about plantation life under slavery from experience than those who were slaves and those who owned slaves. Yet when the subject is broached today they do not normally come to mind nor is their testimony brought to bear, but rather that of women who were neither slaves nor owners of slaves nor residents in slave states. They were usually women of antislavery or abolitionist views, who thought and wrote about slavery, but who rarely, if ever, ventured into slave quarters or into slaveholders' company. They lived up North.
Review, 4200 words
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