Analyzing Within the Plantation Household
Black and White Women of the Old South
Brandi Douglas
Mid America Christian University
HIST 4303
Analyzing Within the Plantation Household
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was born May 28, 1941 in Boston Massachusetts to a Jewish mother and a Protestant father. She was an author, historian, and professor who was best known for her work on women and society in the Antebellum South. She joined Emory University in Atlanta Georgia in 1986 as a history professor and became the director of the Institute for Women's Studies where she founded one of the first doctoral programs in women's studies in the United States. Fox-Genovese was married to fellow historian Eugene Genovese. Together they collaborated
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She offers the claim that while white and black women lived their lives in intimate contact, they were separated by the ever-pervasive and divisive racial lines. To further her claims, Fox-Genovese argues that these distinctive class and racial categories shaped a woman’s experiences and thus shaped their very identities. Fox-Genovese work seeks to form an in-depth look into the day-to-day lives of southern mistresses and their slaves who worked in their houses by utilizing information found in diaries, letters, and oral accounts. Her work takes a previously unprecedented look into the difficult relations between the mistresses and their slaves, the duties prescribed to each, the expectations that were held for them which were based on their gender and to a greater extent their race. Fox-Genovese further argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed from their female counterparts in the north and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by simply looking from a northern perspective.
Fox-Genovese argues that southern slave-owning women and their slaves lived and worked within the close proximity and the most intimate of spaces, the home, and that it encompassed the “basic unit of a unique form of modern society that no familiar theoretical categorization captures” (pg 57). She argues that to look at the southern life through the northern vantage point would yield an inaccurate interpretation of the relationships that formed the basis of southern