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Book Review
| Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Ed. by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii, 324 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2735-5. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5410-7.)
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| By the first half of the nineteenth century, a market revolution was well underway in the Northeast that began to reshape social relations by developing a new working class based on production in factories rather than in households. This alteration in the locus of production devalued domestic work and significantly changed familial relationships. In this regard historians have devoted considerable attention to the role of farmers' daughters in the textile industry and the development of the ideology of separate spheres that defined woman as the moral arbiter and primary parent yet confined her to the domestic realm. Little attention, however, has been devoted to women's role in a southern version of such a market revolution. |
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Recognizing that the Old South is no longer seen as static and prebourgeois despite its reliance on agricultural production, Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie have put together thirteen essays (two of them previously published) in an effort to focus attention on the role of women in southern wage work broadly defined, with the hope of initiating a field on working women in the Old South. They view women's wage work as critical to the development of the market economy and the subsequent changes it brought; they purposely do not posit a particular stage of economic development for the antebellum South, however. |
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