Leo T. reviewed on 11/18/2015 + 1775 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

This is the product of scholarly research in women's studies but is quite readable. The author diligently searched out letters and account books from many libraries as well as reading the 19th and 20th C. published material. In many cases, the lady was left to run the plantation (many of them not all that large) while her husband was away on business or political duties, even though women had few property rights and really could not travel by themselves other than to visit relatives.
It was often a rather lonely life (remember how bad the the roads were in, say, most of Alabama) and she had to see that sufficient food and clothing were produced to take care of the people of the plantation (and sometimes had to 'make' the cash crop). Weather killed some plants and there had to be replanting, in the late fall the hogs had to be slaughtered (she had the key to storage sheds), and the letters/diaries reveal that she did a lot of the sewing to outfit everyone twice a year. In general, relatively little was ordered ready-made. There was only some finishing school type of education offered to young women and it got worse as the North increasingly despised slavery, leading to these ladies being sent only to local academies.
I myself was interested in the business operations and did not read much in the other chapters about everything from marital relations to managing slaves.

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