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Kelly Raggett
Ms. Figueroa
World Literature-Block A
April 11, 2014
American Slavery
Within the Plantation Household: Black & White Women of the Old South
By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
In the novel, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the
Old South, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese the life of typical southern women is described.
The book explains the life of white slave owning women and black slave women. The
lives of those two women were very different. White slave owning women ran the house
as the head of power under their husbands and black slave women did the chores and
most of the dirty work. The author gets a lot of her information from diaries of
southern women. Womens diaries, journals, and correspondence reveal much of the
fabric of their lives-especially their personal perceptions- and much about the dynamics
of antebellum southern society (Fox-Genovese 37).
The book opens with the story of Sarah Gayle. She was a typical white, southern
woman. She wrote diaries of her life and experiences. She lived in Alabama and her
husband, John Gayle, became the governor of Alabama in 1835.
The book then explains the life of southern women within the household itself.
Class and race deeply divided southern women, notwithstanding their shared
experience of life in rural households under the domination of men (Fox-Genovese 43).
White southern women were typically the head of the household slaves. They required
slaves to much of their responsibilities in the house. Slave women cleaned, cooked, and
took care of the children. With the free time the white women had they visited friends,
wrote, and read.
Slave women lived between the two worlds of the plantation and the slave
community (Fox-Genovese 146). The book describes the multiply lives of a slave
women. In their slave homes they lived in single roomed cabins. They worked for sunup
to sundown. Slave girls began work between the ages of six and twelve. Slave women
often worked inside the plantation house. Slave women had to adjust from the brutal
inside of the plantation house to their shack of a slave home (Fox-Genovese).
Both slave and slaveholding women lived in a world in which gender afforded a
principle of the practical, political, and symbolic organization of society (Fox-Genovese
193). For slave women they answered to a master who was not of their natural family,
class, or race and who at any moment could exercise his power according to imperatives
that had nothing to do with family feeling. They knew that he frequently exercised his
power severely and might even make sexual demands that mocked the prevalent norms
of gender relations to which he claimed to subscribe (Fox-Genovese 192).
The book then illustrates the world of slaveholding women. They became
themselves as daughters, wife, and mothers, as the mistress of slaves, as lady, and in a
personal relation to God as embodies in the religious fellowship of their community

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Specifically they thrived to be a lady (Fox-Genovese 242). Slaveholding women

constantly cared about their image as a person. They always looked clean and proper
and they always practiced proper manners. Fox-Genovese got much of her information
on women through their dairies first hand.
The book went on communicating the thoughts of women who opposed slavery
and women who were for it. Women who opposed it did their best to fight it, while still
trying to keep themselves safe. Slaveholders who were for slavery refused to recognize
their slaves as ladies and gentlemen. They thought they were more superior to the black
race.

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I thought the novel, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women
of the Old South, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was very interesting. It was very long and
sometimes hard to read. It occasionally became hard to focus because it jumped around
a lot. The author would jump from topic to topic very quickly in the chapter; this made it
confusing to read. Though, I enjoyed the way the book compared the lives of white
slaveholding women to black slave women. The book went into great detail about how
different and how similar these two groups were. The book provided me with a lot of
knowledge of these two groups. I really enjoyed learning about their lives during the
antebellum time period, as well. I like how the book had a prologue and epilogue of a
southern womans, Sarah Gayles, story, it was very interesting I like how it provided lots
of information to use for the culture and group questions. I wish I had chosen a book
that answered all of my questions though. I also wish the book was shorter. The farther I
got into the book the more I wanted it to end because it was so long. I feel if the chapters
were shorter the book would be more interesting to read. I recommend this book to
anyone interested in learning about southern slaveholding and slave women. I enjoyed
this book; it was very interesting but very long.

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1. What is it?
Slavery is a social-economic system under which certain persons known as
slaves are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to perform labor or
services (List of Slaves par 1). American slavery is the legal institution of
chattel slavery that existed in the United States of America in the 18 th and 19th
centuries (Slavery in the United States par 1). Slavery started in the thirteen
colonies and continued until Abraham Lincoln announced his Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863, abolishing slavery. Slavery mostly took place in
the Southern states. Slaves worked Clearing trees and starting crops on virgin
fields (Slavery in the United States par 39). They also worked on plantations
picking cotton. Slaves were generally Africans transported or descendants from
those transported from Africa.
2. What is it known for?
American slavery is known for many things. It is often associated with
plantations, the cotton industry, Southern society, and cruel beatings. American
slavery is also known for the separation of the Northern and Southern states. The
separation later caused the civil war. Starting in 1777 slavery mostly took place
down in the southern states. This time period later became the antebellum time
(Slavery in the United States par 20). For the South did not repudiate slavery
when it abandoned other forms of unfree labor. Rather, it embraced slavery as
the foundation of its social relations and, in so doing, established massive
barriers to the penetration of capitalism into southern life and institutions even
as it mortgaged its economy to the world market The plantation South would
never have existed, much less expanded, had it not been for the capitalist world
market. From its origins in the tobacco economy of the seventeenth-century
Chesapeake until the development of the cotton belt of the nineteenth-century
Deep South, the plantation system grew apace with the development of and
demand for staple crops exchanged in the world market (Fox-Genovese 54 and
56). The treatment of slaves in the United States varied by time and place, but
was generally brutal and degrading. Whipping, execution and sexual abuse
including rape were common Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling,
hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and/or imprisonment.
Punishment was most often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived
infractions, but slaves were also sometimes abused to assert the dominance of
their master or overseer (Treatment of Slaves in the United States par 1 and 3).
3. What is its history?
American slavery took place in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery began in the
United States from the time of the thirteen colonies when the Declaration of
Independence was signed in 1776 (Slavery in the United States par 1). It
continued throughout the U.S. as the country grew. A total of about 600,000
slaves were imported into the Thirteen Colonies and the U.S. The

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transformation of the status of Africans from indentured servitude to slavery

happened gradually. There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginias
history (Slavery in the United States par 4 and 8). Laws for slavery and slave
codes started in 1705 with the Virginia Slave codes (Slavery in the United States
par 12). Between 1777 and 1804, anti-slavery laws or constitutions were passed
in every state north of the Mason-Dixon Line (Slavery in the United States par
25). The country soon split into two groups: the North, free states, and the South,
slaves states. The Mason- Dixon line split these two groups (Slave and free
states par 3). In the 1800s the cotton industry grew greatly in the South with the
invention of the cotton gin, causing more demand for slave labor. In 1850 they
passed a more stringent Federal fugitive slave law. Refugees from slavery
continued to flee the South via the Underground Railroad By 1860 the slave
population in the United States had reached 4 million (Slavery in the United
States par 84 and 32). In 1860 Abraham Lincoln, a republican and abolitionist,
was elected president. On January 1, 1863 Lincoln announced the Emancipation
Proclamation. This abolished slavery in the U.S. Congress then voted for the
Thirteenth Amendment and made emancipation permanent (Slavery in the
United States par 95 and 96).
4. What culture is associated with it?
A major culture associated with American slavery is slave women. Slave women
were mostly black Africans that were either transported there from Africa or
descendants of those who were transported. the size of a household could have
a decisive impact on the work assignments and living conditions of slave women,
and on the kinds of work performed by the wives and daughters of household
heads (Fox-Genovese 69). Slave women primarily worked in the kitchens of
others, preparing food for others. Slave women also cooked over open fires for
their own families in the quarters, where they did not have kitchens at all (FoxGenovese 98). Slaves were expected to perform the major portion of the work for
which the mistresses were responsible (Fox-Genovese 135). Often, slave
women, especially when they worked in the house, had a good reason to know
their mistresses better than their mistresses knew them (Fox-Genovese 133).
5. What group is associated with it?
One group associated with slavery was the southern slave owning women or
wives. Antebellum southern women, like all other, lived in a discrete social
system and political economy within which gender, class, and race relations
shaped their lives and identities (Fox-Genovese 37). Slaveholding women could
attend schools that lay far from their homes and could visit resorts as well as
friends in distant regions. They could reside in the state or even the national

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capital in conformity with the political careers of their male kin (Fox-Genovese
69). Generally, the women had a lot of freedom and free time. They mostly
supervised the work of others. plantation mistresses carried heavy
responsibilities for overseeing the work of the house slaves (Fox- Genovese
97). The mistress of the household-normally the wife of its master assumed the
mantle of ruling lady As a symbol of her station, she carried the keys to the
innumerable storerooms and domestic outbuilding (Fox-Genovese 98). When
the white women of the house did work they often sewed their own clothing,
Southern women tatted, embroidered, and knitted They also made slaves
clothing (Fox-Genovese 120). Mistresses lived intimately with their female
house slaves, especially their own and their childrens nurses, and in an extended
personal circle The mistresses, alternating between impatience with and
compassion for their female slaves, they were trapped at the center of a web of
human relations in which both they and their slaves, however unequally, defined
the responsibilities and imposed the burdens that constituted the role of
mistress (Fox-Genovese 131 and 132).
6. What are the practices/traditions of the group associated with it?
One practice of southern slaveholding women was that they generally didnt raise
their children on hand. In infancy and early childhood, the vast majority of
slaveholders daughters received much of their care from slaves Although they
often accompanied their mothers on visits to family, friends, or church, they
normally did so with one or more slave nurses in tow (Fox-Genovese 111).
Young southern women do not appear to have been taught much about the
raising of children, even though they frequently had numerous young siblings.
Because the youngest children were left largely to the care of nurses, young
women did not normally see their own mothers taking care of childrens basic
needs (Fox-Genovese 112). Since slaveholding children grew up under the care of
slaves, when they grew up and had kids their kids got the same care from slaves.
Slaveholding daughters grew up in their mothers shadows and under their
tutelage. They learned the fundamentals of adult responsibilities from their
mothers rather than from teachers (Fox-Genovese 113). This taught them to
follow in their mothers footsteps of an easy going life where slaves did most of
their work and they supervised them. This work often included taking care of
their children.
7. Is it associated with a religion, philosophy, belief system or other devotion?
Religion, politics, and culture were rooted in and continually transformed the
slaveholders daily lives and attitudes (Fox-Genovese 44). Slave owners thought
it was their Christian duty to teach and proclaim the bible to their slaves. Some
say that for slaves accepting Christianity became a part of accepting America
as a home (Religion and Slavery par 3). Preachers emphasized the

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appropriate behavior of slaves to keep in their plan, and acknowledged the slaves
identity as both person and property ...Preachers taught the masters
responsibility and the concept of appropriate paternal treatment (Slavery in
the United States par 72). In the south, as in many other societies, church and
state substantially reinforced the prevalent forms of male dominance As a
Christian society the South celebrated the special relation of the individual to
God, and, as power of the individual male head of household from undue
influence by the state (Fox-Genovese 43 and 63). Slave owners believed in their
natural superiority to the African slave. They thought they were better because of
their skin color. They thought they were smarter and better all around. Many
slaves were Baptists or Methodists. Generally slaves were allowed to attend mass
with their owners (Slavery in the United States par 70 and 71).
8. What impact his it had on the world? (United States)
Slavery impacted the United States greatly. Slavery began when the country
began and grew with the country. It created an economy for it. It eventually split
the country into two groups as well. Many Northern states moved towards
emancipation during the Revolutionary Era (Slavery in the United States par
19). States north of the Mason-Dixon Line all passed anti-slavery laws. The
southern states embraced slavery and created many cotton plantations (Slavery
in the United States par 88). When Lincoln won the 1860 election it caused
uproar in the South. Slave owners were worried that a sudden emancipation of 4
million slaves would create problems with their economy. The South seceded
from the Union and created their own nation called the Confederate States of
America. This created a Civil War in the United States (Slavery in the United
States par 89 and 90). Although slavery helped the American economy it divided
the country and caused war. It caused the rise of racial discrimination. This
formed racial discrimination groups, such as the Klu Klux Klan, and later lead to
the civil rights movement.
9. How would you feel if you were involved?
If I was involved as a slave I would probably feel helpless. Generally, if slaves
rebelled it just caused beatings and worse treatment. I wouldnt know what to do.
I would probably just go through my work days, trying to get by. If the chance
came for me to get away by the Underground Railroad I would probably take it. I
would run away up north.
If I was involved as a slave owner I would probably be very happy because I
would be the upper class. I would feel powerful. As a southern teenager I would

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probably feel weird growing up with slaves/servants raising me. I would probably
feel weird having slaves wait on me too.

Work Cited

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Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women
of the Old South. The University of North Carolina Press. 1988. Print.
List of Slaves. Wikipedia. September 24, 2013. Web. April 2, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=List_of_slaves&action=history.
Religion and Slavery. Africans in America. Web. April 2, 2014.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr2.html.
Slave and Free States. Wikipedia. January 3, 2013. Web. April 3, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Slave_and_free_states&action=history.
Slavery in the United States. Wikipedia. March 16, 2014. Web. March 31, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Slavery_in_the_United_States&action=history.
Treatment of Slaves in the United States. Wikipedia. December 10, 2013. Web. April 3,
2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_United_States&action=history.