Failed Sisterhood: Expectations and Betrayal Between the Women of the Antebellum South
File(s)
Date
2008-06-11Author
Filidoro, Erica
Advisor(s)
Kuhl, Michelle
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Mistresses and slave women in the antebellum South lived and often suffered
together under an oppressive patriarchy. They all endured a kind of enslavement
in a system that reduced all women to the property of White men in some way.
Previous historians have argued that this kindled gender solidarity between White and
Black women. Others have argued that issues of race, class, privilege, and jealousy
prevented the formation of any sense of sisterhood between the two groups of women.
However, the issue is more complex than simply discovering whether there was or
was not gender solidarity. Although antebellum women did not achieve any real unity,
mistress journals and slave narratives reveal that on rare but important occasions they
acknowledged the possibility of sisterhood and responded with guilt, betrayal, or anger
at their failure to achieve it. These subtler nuances reveal a complicated relationship
between mistress and bondswoman under slavery that transcended easy definitions
according to race, privilege, or gender.
Subject
Black Women
Slaves--United States
African-American women
Women slaves -- America-- history
Race relations
Sisterhood
Antebellum South
Southern women
Permanent Link
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/28240Description
Oshkosh Scholar, Volume 3, 2008, pp. 34-43.
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