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Catherine Clinton's The Plantation Mistress

1892 Words8 Pages

“The pageantry days gone by-chivalrous cavaliers and belles in hoop skirts-lives in memory for many southerners” –Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress, 1983

Catherine, Clinton. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, c. 1983. Pp. 331. $19.95, ISBN 0-394-51686
Catherine Clinton was born to an Episcopalian family in Seattle, Washington on the 5th of April, 1952. Two years later, the Clintons moved to Kansas City, Missouri where she spent most of her childhood. In 1969, she graduated from Sunset Hill School for Girls and set her eyes to Harvard University to continue her education. At Harvard, Clinton studied Sociology and Afro-American Studies and, after writing an Honors Thesis …show more content…

This book revolved around an era where the three structures focused very seriously on slavery. The structure, in the south especially, was agricultural; this agriculture, which moved from a focus on tobacco before the Revolutionary War to cotton based agriculture after the war. In both cases, slaves were the cornerstone of productivity. The infrastructure was still a government by discussion; however there was the beginning of a rift of opinion on the necessity of slavery. This rift found its roots in the superstructural level: the North felt that slavery was obsolete and cruel, while the South believed that slavery was economically necessary and morally inconsequential. Clinton believed that women played a more important role in this superstructural schism that previously theorized; “In the great mass of evidence demonstrating the split between the antebellum North and South, on significant aspect has been repeatedly overlooked by historical scholarship: the role of women,” (Clinton, 5). In this book, Clinton makes the claim that for the most part women’s history in the United States has been looked at only through the lens of the North. Women in New England, as Clinton argued, enjoyed a much more free life even though they were not completely autonomous. Southern women however, were treated almost, if not equally as poor as the slaves on the southern plantations. Women in the antebellum South were expected to honor and serve their patriarch and this respect was expected to be carried over into marriage were the wife would be subservient to her

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