Hidden lives -- Women in the land of cotton -- Slave of slaves -- Circle of kin -- The day to fix my fate -- The moral bind -- The fallen woman -- Equally their due -- Precious and precarious in body and soul -- Every woman was an island -- The curse of slavery -- The sexual dynamics of slavery -- Foucalt meets mandingo.
Summary
This study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers a serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, the author sets before us the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master.