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Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South Wilma A. Dunaway (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South By Wilma A. Dunaway (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South by Wilma A. Dunaway (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)


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Summary

This is the first study of 19th-century Appalachian women. Wilma A. Dunaway moves beyond the black-white dichotomy and the preoccupation with affluent females, and argues that the nature of a woman's work was determined by her race, ethnicity, and/or class positions.

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South Summary

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South by Wilma A. Dunaway (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground to examine the race, class, and ethnic differences among antebellum Southern Appalachian women. Most women defied separate spheres of gender conventions to undertake agricultural and non-agricultural labors that were essential to family survival or community well-being. Unlike elite and middle-class females, Cherokee, black, and poor white women engaged in stigmatized labors and worked alongside males in cross-racial settings. To support their work portfolios, non-white and most poor white women constructed non-patriarchal families that challenged cultural ideals of motherhood. Churches and courts inequitably regulated the sexual behaviors of these women and treated their households as aberrations that were not entitled to the legal privilege of family sanctity. Legal and religious officials sanctioned family break-ups and the removal, indenturement, or enslavement of their children. Still, many women resisted patriarchal conventions through their work lives, family roles, and group activism.

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South Reviews

Expanding on her path-breaking studies of the antebellum Appalachian South, this newest book by Wilma A. Dunaway examines the varying work and family patterns of the region' poor whites, Native American, and black women. aboton extensive research in numerous primary and secondary sources, her analysis of the factors leading to these patterns of behavior provides considerable new and important information about the people in a location which has not previously been studied in such detail, but also makes for quite interesting comparisons with those in other areas of the South. -Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester
In this lucid and informative contribution to the histories of the Antebellum Mountain South, Dunaway opens a window on the everyday and ongoing practices of women's lives among poor, racially and ethnically diverse peoples of Appalachia. Focused and detailed in the idiom of historical capitalism, Dunaway offers a conceptually robust account that unsettles the separate spheres and 'cult of domesticity' assumed to characterize gender relations in the period 1700-1860. In her account, she reveals the complex and diverse expressions of patriarchy-at once a luxury offered by familial protection among middle class families, and an encumbrance fostered by the public regulation and slaveholder disruption of poor female headed households. Dunaway leaves no one safe behind the excuse that they didn't know about women's centrality to family reproduction, livelihood strategies, and market participation. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the synergies among laboring relations and capacities, family formations, and women as agents of their lives and of southern history. -Shelley Feldman, Cornell University and Binghamton University
Wilma Dunaway presents a path-breaking theoretically and empirically grounded analysis of the diversity among women in the antebellum Mountain South that challenges the patriarchal, racist, and classist mythology and ideology found in scholarship and popular culture. She centers this powerful and compelling book around women, work and family, illuminating the racial and ethnic cleavages, and class contradictions among these women, and making visible working class women, including those of European, Indigenous, and African descent. Dunaway meticulously documents the deep difference and division in the daily experiences of women - in their work and family lives and struggles, and of the complexity and richness of the Southern and especially Appalachian reality in U.S. history. This work is a critically important contribution to feminist and gender/race/class analysis, and to American and Southern studies in the context of global capitalism and imperialism. -Walda Katz-Fishman, Howard University
One by one, as her books appear, Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground. Women, Work, and Family in the Anbellum Mountain South is empirically rich, as one has come to expect from Dunaway. But here the wealth of data, the care of scholarship, and the challenge to traditional thinking are so meticulously combined as to put the reader in the challenging, almost awkward, position of having to rethink all that was known, or thought to have been known, about women in the antebellum South. This book ranks with Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention. --Charles Lemert, The John C. Andrus Professor of Sociology, Wesleyan University.
Dunaway investigates the multi-ethnic majority of females who resided between 1700 and 1860 in the Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia south to Alabama and Virginia and the Carolinas east to Kentucky and Tennessee. -Reference & Research Book News
Recommended. -Choice
...a well-crafted study that will no doubt offer a starting point for many other scholars who wish to consider issues of gender within a specific region, especially the antebellum South. -Deborah L. Bauer, H-Women

About Wilma A. Dunaway (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Wilma A. Dunaway was born into an interracial family in east Tennessee in 1944. For more than two decades, she worked in civil rights and public services organizations in the Appalachian region. At present, she is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dunaway is a specialist in international slavery studies, Native American studies, Appalachian studies, and world-system analysis. Her dissertation about the incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the capitalist world economy was awarded a Wilson Fellowship and the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. She has won several awards for her previous three works on Appalachia and slavery, including two Weatherford Awards. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in numerous history and social science journals.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Racial, Ethnic, and Class Disjunctures among Appalachian Women: 1. No gendered sisterhood: ethnic and religious conflict among Euro-American women; 2. Not a shared patriarchal space: imperialism, racism, and cultural persistence of indigenous Appalachian women; 3. Not a shared sisterhood of subordination: racism, slavery, and resistance by black Appalachian females; 4. Not even sisters among their own kind: the centrality of class divisions among Appalachian women; Part II. Structural and Social Contradictions between Women's Productive and Reproductive Labors: 5. The myth of male farming and women's agricultural labor; 6. The myth of separate spheres and women's non-agricultural labor; 7. Family as privilege: public regulation of non-patriarchal households; 8. Motherhood as privilege: patriarchal intervention into women's reproductive labors.

Additional information

NPB9780521886192
9780521886192
0521886198
Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South by Wilma A. Dunaway (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
2008-03-10
320
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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