| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, editors. Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 324. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
This collection of essays self-consciously departs from the dominant trends in antebellum southern women's history by looking at southern women who were not plantation mistresses or slaves. Despite a few exceptions, it is somewhat troubling that a book on the working women of the Old South does not include slave women systematically in its content or analysis. Most of the essays look at unusual groups of southern women such as black and white nuns in the Old South, prostitutes, or other women such as teachers and children's nurses that have hitherto not been the subject of systematic historical inquiry. The rest of the collection, for the most part, contains essays on working-class white women whose history has been virtually hidden in the mainstream historical narratives of the pre-Civil War South.	1
While editors Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie ought to be commended for bringing to light the presence of these disparate groups of southern women, their introduction purports to do much more. Delfino and Gillespie make the somewhat ambitious claim that their book will challenge the depiction of southern society as a "prebourgeois agricultural society" (p. 2). And they certainly overreach when they state that this work "establishes the existence of a viable industrial revolution under way in the Old South" (p. 5). Questionable and outdated arguments that an "uneasy alliance" (p. 1) existed between mistresses and slaves and that the Civil War was a confrontation between "slavery and industrial capitalism" (p. 4) also mar the introduction. The latter statement, in fact, contradicts the overall argument of the editors.	2
The essays are far more modest in their purview. The first two, by James Taylor Carson and Sarah P. Hill, on the women of the southeastern Indian nations, (the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws), skillfully trace their evolving economic and political roles in the context of growing market activity and trade with white settlers. Carson makes a case for the continuing significance of traditional cultures, but Hill concludes that the Cherokees increasingly imitated the institutions of the "dominant European American culture" (p. 49). These two essays seem to stand apart from the rest of the collection.	3
The most original essays are those that deal with women on the peripheries of the slave economy but that are also sensitive to the issues of slavery and race, which arguably defined southern society before the Civil War to a greater extent than the rise of the factory system and wage work. Stephanie Cole's article on children's nurses presents us with a well-documented account of slaveholders' changing preferences by race for child care in border slave state cities. In an interesting and complex argument, Cole writes that while border state slaveholders preferred white nurses as the antebellum period wore on, they were governed by the class assumptions of slave society. Timothy Lockley's article on black and white women in antebellum Savannah reveals that black women worked longer days than their white counterparts and were excluded from certain professions such as teaching. Like Cole, he shows slaveholders' growing preference for white women for domestic work. Nevertheless, Lockley argues that black and white women sometimes worked together as seamstresses, launderers, and domestics. He also uncovers the near monopoly that black and slave women had on market activity even though white women owned most of the stores in antebellum Savannah. Race, he concludes, was merely one of the markers of female work in antebellum Savannah. E. Susan Barber's provocative and well-researched article on prostitutes and sex workers in Richmond uncovers the existence of several houses of "ill repute" by an imaginative and thorough use of census and court records. Black prostitutes tended to suffer heavier punishments at the hands of the law, including whippings. During the Civil War, Barber shows that prostitution and brothels that serviced the Confederate and Union armies became more visible and posed an open challenge to southern notions of racial purity and sexuality.	. . .

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