| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds. Neither Lady Nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2002)

WITH THIS VOLUME, editors Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie have furthered the laudable goal of recovering the history of the vast majority of Old South women who, some may be surprised to learn, were neither plantation mistresses nor slaves. As the introduction explains, "sandwiched between the tangled worlds of mistresses and slaves lived hundreds of thousands of women in the Old South." (3) The essays that follow demonstrate that these thousands included a wide array of women distinguished by class, cultural, and ethnic differences as well as by type of employment. "Work" is broadly defined to include the occupations of the wealthiest and poorest of women, which in turn provides an eclectic series of snapshots of a complex and diverse Old South. Through gendered lenses, readers encounter Native American traders and weavers, white Jewish teachers, free black and white Catholic nuns.

The book is divided into four parts. The first section, "The Rural World and the Coming of the Market Economy," challenges earlier works that assumed that women's (primarily domestic) tasks placed them outside the public world of commerce. The second section offers essays on domestic nurses and various urban wage-earning women. The third section, entitled "Women as Unacknowledged Professionals," includes essays on prostitutes, teachers, and nuns. The fourth section features women who worked in the antebellum South's mills and mines. This grouping of individual essays according to a sub-theme or topic is a good idea, but unfortunately does not work very well in this collection. For example, Sarah Hill's Cherokee basket weavers and traders are combined with Stephanie McCurry's white yeoman farm wives in Part One. True, both essays concern women's economic role in the emerging market economy, but so, more or less, do the essays that appear in other sections. What ultimately connects Hill and McCurry's subjects is simply being Southern and rural. Equally unsatisfactory as a theme is Part Three's combining of E. Susan Barber's study of prostitution with two studies of nuns under the vague designation, "unacknowledged professionals." The book's remaining sections, Part Two's "Wage-Earning Women in the Urban South" and Part Four's "Working Women in the Industrial South," are so similar in focus that several of their essays could have appeared in either section. In fairness to the editors, there is no easy solution to organizing such disparate stories. Still, greater thematic coherence would have better facilitated classroom use of the book.

Issues of organization aside, the essays are well researched and written; indeed, several are outstanding, including the two opening essays on Native American women. Sarah Hill skillfully traces the rise and fall of Cherokee women's important economic role as basket weavers and traders within the changes brought by the American Revolution, the mixing of Cherokees with whites, and the growing influence of European patriarchal traditions upon Cherokee society. More broadly, James Taylor Carson traces the impact of the expanding US market economy on the lives of Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw women before 1830.

Although this collection focuses on working women, a number of essays take us into the world of elite white families. Stephanie Cole provides a nuanced study of emerging notions of "moral motherhood" as reflected in the employment of children's nurses in the decades leading up to the Civil War. She locates the developing stereotype of "Mammy" among whites who sought to justify the use of slaves as nurses amid a trend that deemed older white women more appropriate caretakers for refined, impressionable white children. Emily Bingham and Penny Richards demonstrate that elite tenets of True Womanhood likewise shaped the lives of Rachel, Ellen, and Caroline Mordecai of North Carolina. Although the sisters enjoyed the status of ladies, they were not the indolent, indulged ladies suggested in the book's title. Rather, the daughters of Jacob Mordecai struggled to meet the demands of family while teaching at their father's female academy. Their efforts to reconcile personal and professional responsibilities required their unending flexibility and sacrifice. Precisely because ladies were not expected to work for a living, the Mordecai sisters did not parade their careers before the public and thus received little credit—and sometimes no pay—for their work.

Two studies of Catholic nuns take us beyond the religious activities of Southern women. Emily Clark's fascinating study of the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans reveals how this group combined exalted status with professional success. Displaying "masculine" business acumen as financial managers, slaveholders, and planters, the nuns simultaneously displayed distinctly "feminine" values by insisting that slave women's chastity be protected and their right to marriage honoured. Diane Batts Morrow's study of the Oblate Sisters of Providence demonstrates how free African-American women achieved unusual economic solvency and respectability in the antebellum South within the confines of the Catholic Church.

Focusing on working-class women, Elizabeth Howe, Bess Beatty, and Michelle Gillespie provide tantalizing analyses of women millworkers. Howe studies the mostly white women employed in western Virginia's sewing, clothing, and textile industries. Although skills, working conditions, and wages varied substantially among women employed in the textile industry, she notes that greater numbers of women were exploited as pieceworkers by labour contractors, manufacturers, and merchant tailors. Beatty similarly finds women of varying class backgrounds working in the textile mills of North Carolina, although most, she emphasizes, were poor. She further shows that women's responses to the circumstances of the workplace varied. In contrast to the common stereotype of "docile" female workers, some women protested oppressive conditions, forcing owners to address worker grievances. Michele Gillespie's essay on Georgia textile workers reveals that manufacturers used gender, race, and class stereotypes to justify the employment of rural white women long before the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. To exploit the cheap labour of young, single women and children, employers trumpeted millwork as a suitable way for economically-stressed families to escape poverty.

Enormous energy and excellent research went into the writing of this collection of essays, and no doubt several fine books from its various authors will follow. For now, students of Southern women's history are fortunate to have such wide-ranging scholarship contained within the pages of one book.


Victoria E. Bynum Texas State University, San Marcos

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