The_Plantation_Mistress

The Plantation Mistress “The Plantation Mistress” By Catherine Clinton The Plantation Mistress focuses on the elite women living on plantations with twenty or more slaves in the seven seaboard states of the plantation South during the period between 1780 and 1835. Through the study of nearly 500 manuscript collections that housed the contents of family letters, household inventories, the papers of female academies, commonplace books and physicians’ records Clinton attempts to shed light upon the hidden lives of southern plantation mistresses, who she states, have been prisoners of myth, legend, and folklore. Many of the diaries and memoirs she studied are unpublished and unexamined. Clinton reveals the life of a plantation mistress and her role as wife, mother, and household manager in the antebellum South. Additional areas of discussion include kinship, courtship, marriage, and divorce; moral standards; health and childbearing; the isolation of plantation life; the “curse of slavery” and the “sexual dynamics of slavery.” Clinton believed that southern women occupied an undesirable position with respect to women of the North. She found that southern women married at a younger age, had more children, and died earlier, often in childbirth. They were also burdened with more complex tasks of household management women, plantation, clinton, southern, slavery, mistress, south, reading, prisoners, life, states, slaves, isolation, however, household, antebellum, woman, upon, tale, system, shed, really, planter, patriarchy, oppression, often, myth, myself, male, lives, light, leisure, hollywood, female, feel