Thavolia Glymph

One of the questions that lingered after our Reading the Civil War project was, "What were the women doing?" Well, if I were to make a short list of books to answer that question, this would be at the top of it. There are other books to tell the stories of individual women, but this book continues the work of Out of the House of Bondage by extending the depiction of women beyond the plantation.

This book is broken into three sections. Southern Women contains chapters on slaveholding white women who've had to flee their homes; on poor white women (often encroached upon by those refugees); and enslaved women. Northern women discusses both those who spent the war in the north, and also those who went south -- supposedly to help the enslaved and recently freed, but depicting the traps of white supremacy they continued to fall into. Finally, in the Hard Hand of War, we see the refugees who fell under the protection of the Union Army -- both the slaveholding women insisting on retaining whatever scraps of their former status they could, and Black women trying to expand freedom for themselves, their families, and their people.

This answered so many questions that I had, and opened my eyes to so much that had never occurred to me. I am so grateful to have access to Glymph's scholarship.… (más)

Just a really incredible exploration of enslaved women and their relationship to white women enslavers; Glymph just bulldozes the hell out of all historiography that tries to claim white women enslavers were somehow more sympathetic or not as deeply entwined in slavery, and also manages to explore this deeply fascinating moment where slavery is falling away and waged labor is beginning to take its place, and what that means for each of the actors involved--how Black women were actually more capable than white women at negotiating wages, etc., because they had a sense of what work looked like per day than white women did. Just super fascinating, really accessible, and didn't feel repetitive. Strongly, strongly recommend.… (más)

Another book from the Less Stupid Civil War Reading Group -- and probably my favorite. Mostly because it covered an area that I knew the least about -- the day-to-day lives of women -- both slaveholder and slave -- in the South -- before, during, and after the Civil War. Richly documented and compiled from mostly first-hand sources -- it is filled with diary accounts of white women bitching about their slaves, then complaining about having to do without them, or starting to fear them during the war, then grappling with the new realities of having to do business with them after the war. There are slave narratives, too -- some written at the time, some recollected decades after, of beatings, of ill-treatment at the hands of the wives (not just the husbands) in slave-owning households, stories of running off, of setting up households after the war and fighting for their dignity.

I have spent hours discussing this book and could go on and on about it -- but I want to mention two things in particular. First -- I appreciated Glymph's insistence on slave women's "recalcitrance" as explicit political resistance to the system of slavery, and how that shaped post-war race relations. Second -- that the ideal of domesticity that Southern white women were held to was one that was impossible -- and (this is me reading in, here) how that is something that has always been true -- and an effective way to control women.

Finally, this book had me thinking about the psychology of power -- that put in an unjustifiable situation -- the power to beat, kill, remove children and families from slaves -- the brain will work hard to invent justifications so that it can continue thinking of itself as a good person. Perhaps even a righteous, beleaguered one. Maybe even the real victim here! And whether it is possible to structure society in a way that will encourage the perpetuation of justice, rather than injustice.

A sometimes difficult, but rich and rewarding read. I am grateful for the discovery.… (más)