REEXAMINING THE "BENEVOLENT" SOUTHERN BELLE
Book review for Civil War and Reconstruction
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The prevailing narrative of the nineteenth century’s "Southern Belle" embraces a belief that slaveholding mistresses treated household slaves with paternalistic sympathy. This idea accepts that white women played little to no role in the wrath of the slaveholding economy both nationally and domestically. This narrative is of course, contradictory because there can be no such thing as a benevolent slaveholder when American slavery is inevitably violent. Women’s roles throughout general history have been largely ignored. As a response, Thavolia Glymph’s 2008 book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household uncovers the agency white women, as well as enslaved black women had within a patriarchal and slave society.[1] By narrowing the scope to focus on a specific gender, the complexity of the perspectives of all actors during a time when the meaning of race and freedom were rapidly evolving becomes more clear. Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage reconceptualizes race and gender relations to reveal the fears, agency, and responses that penetrated both black and white women before, during, and after the Civil War.
Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage is a 2008 book that analyzes the power relations between mistresses and enslaved black women within the plantation household during the Antebellum, Civil War, and post-war periods. The paradigm of the “bad master” who routinely asserted violence to his slaves is traditionally tied and limited to men. Similarly, his white mistress is discounted and romanticized to be "a hardworking, introspective, pious, versatile wife and mother who [tried] to live up to the prescriptions set before her by men."[2] Glymph attributes this understanding as a result of three intermingling causes, the lost cause propaganda of the Civil War, the rejection of former slave testimonies, and gender subordination that lives within modern historiography. Birthed, raised, and profiting from a proslavery ideology, white women were not inept from racial attitudes and asserting those beliefs and their power to maintain the plantation household. Therefore, akin to the wave of twentieth-century feminist revisionism, Glymph resurfaces the discussion by diverting from the dominant narrative of the violent white male slave master and refocuses it on black and white women. In doing so, she challenges the myth of the “Southern Belle” and the belief that white women shared a sense of solidarity with black female slaves since they were all victims under the umbrella of the patriarchy. To clear the distinction between women of different races and backgrounds, Glymph reconsiders both the diaries of white women who casted their role in slaveholding under a good light and slave testimonies to reveal that "mistresses became expert in the use of psychological and physical violence and, influence[d] the construction of antebellum slave society in its gender and racial dimensions"[3] In addition, she reconsiders how mistresses’ common complaints of enslaved women were in actuality, the fruition of their forms of resistance.
Examining household labor is an effective way to view white and black women relations because of their interminable intermingling and close proximity to each other. To properly analyze this relation, it is beneficial to view these women under the gendered and patriarchal definition in which they lived. One where gendered roles placed men beyond the home to deal with merchants and politics to maintain their plantation, where mistresses were tied to the private sphere of the home, and black women tied to slavery. With mistresses at home relied on to manage the standards of domesticity and a slave economy, a variety of reasons as to why “physical conflict…occurred much more frequently between mistresses and slaves than between masters and slaves” erupt.[4] Inherent racism aside, mistresses’ violence may be attributed to harbored jealousy toward the black women their husbands raped and toward the mixed raced children they produced. However, limiting white women’s violence to the hands of their link to their husbands delimits the amount of free will and power they actually had. Mistresses were as much agents of violence as their husbands were, especially during the turn of the war. This is when their husband’s prolonged absence coupled with their slave’s boiling up resistance forced them to transition from the carefree belle to the plantation mistress. “[Slavery] obligations were not all different or gendered. Masters and mistresses, alike, nursed sick slaves, doled out supplies, and passed on old clothing. From the slaves’ point of view, it made little difference which of them carried out these responsibilities”[5] and violence. In other words, mistresses under their free will, would punish slaves to maintain domestic labor or sometimes for no reason at all.
Black women within American were constantly manifesting forms of agency. During enslavement, day-to-day resistance included feigning illness, playing dumb, or working slower or more lazily as mistresses may have interpreted it. As a response, mistresses would ensue punishment by physical force or by simply doing the work themselves to prove an example. In essence, “resistance could thus be construed…as a management problem and as incontrovertible evidence that black women were ‘by nature’ savage and uncivilized.” in need of teaching by white women.[6] As emancipation inched closer to reality, household slaves commenced the destruction of the plantation by making it increasingly unmanageable and unrecognizable. In turn, this left more room and capacity for black women to act on their desires and be “claimants to power and privilege. [However,] to white Americans, their freedom was the most unearned and their interpretation of it, the most misguided"[7] Previous narratives assert former mistresses believed seeing black women claim and practice rights was a parody since they believed black women tried to emulate white norms such as domesticity. In reality, black women attempted to forge new lives with their new tools unrestricted of established norms. They attempted to actively participate within both sides of the market economy rather than at home like white women. Purchasing goods from white women such as dresses, quilts, pillows, among others may have led to white women’s interpretation as a want for emulation. Further, formerly enslaved women did not follow a common white gendered experience because in freedom, they soon pursued citizenship, claimed their femaleness, negotiated fair wages, gained land ownership, and the right to private lives. Therefore, by “burying slave women's resistance in the gendered language of domesticity, slaveholders [and mistresses] discounted it” and believed the war was a justification to retain to their former racist ways.[8]
Thavolia Glymph’s book is a valuable piece for feminist literature and history as it broadens the general understanding of America during the Civil War and reconstruction. A great deal of historiography previous to the twentieth century has ignored women’s roles and their impact on the social, economic, and political sphere within and outside the home. Moreover, when women are given attention, dominant narratives compress them into one model; the benevolent, gentle, and submissive homemaker. Black enslaved women were given even less attention than their white counterparts for evident reasons. Within the home, they are stereotyped as the mistress’ antithesis; a loyal but lazy “mammy” character. “Such thinking continued well into the twentieth century as white women continued to construe black women’s resistance as a problem of character rather than of politics.”[9] In addition, such narrow understanding transcended through emancipation, reconstruction, and to our time since it was and is used as an oppressive tool to maintain class hierarchy. For example, former mistresses were so committed to the Confederate cause and repulsed by the greater responsibility opened by emancipation and therefore, hung to their class power and retained racists beliefs that black women existed to serve. Thus, Glymph’s demystifying reanalysis turns those worn out gendered stereotypes on its head by revealing a very present agency within both races.
Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House reconceptualizes race and gender relations to reveal the fears, agency, and responses that penetrated both black and white women before, during, and after the Civil War. The war was a literal battleground for freedom and rights and emancipation only intensified this fight. This environment was mirrored between white mistresses and enslaved women as seen in the transformed social and cultural constructions and interactions within the household. Previous misconceptions were a result of a dominating top-down historiography that is inherently male gendered and ignores women within society. It ignored how much work and effort white women took to maintain a racist and unequal society as well as the effort black women took to resist it. Therefore, Glymph’s piece contributes to a new history to most importantly reveal “that the new ‘whole life’ of black women…was a rebuke to former mistresses.”[10]
[1] Glymph, Thavolia, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[2] Ibid. 21.
[3] Ibid. 33.
[4] Ibid. 36.
[5] Ibid. 89.
[6] Ibid. 91.
[7] Ibid. 213.
[8] Ibid. 91.
[9] Ibid. 92.