| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Cynthia M. Kennedy. Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society. (Blacks in the Diaspora.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 311. $49.95.
This is an excellent study of the lives of slaveholding women, slave women, and the working poor white women and free women of color in antebellum Charleston. Cynthia M. Kennedy's most important contribution is her juxtaposition of these various women, who lived in intimate proximity and were defined by each other, despite the vast differences and animosities separating them. Furthermore, the urban setting of Charleston comes alive in her beautifully written book.	1
Building on Kathleen Brown's work on how gender was used to define race and power relations, Kennedy argues that "women knew who they were precisely because they mingled daily in explosive intimacy and observed constantly who they were not" (p. 2). Her use of the metaphor of the braid to underscore how intertwined women's lives were, she cautions, does not take away from the unequal relations separating them as well.	2
Charleston appears as a teeming city, with white and black men and women jostling each other along its pathways. Using newspaper, census, and court records, Kennedy enumerates various occupations and business opportunities for slave and free women: they laundered and manufactured clothes, braided hair, cooked, taught, kept boarding houses, prostituted themselves, and sold whatever goods they could in Charleston's market. Women had enormous economic impact on the city, and the economic opportunities they seized had implications for themselves, including for slaves the possibility of purchasing their own freedom or that of a family member.	. . .

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