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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Black And White Women Summary

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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 …show more content…

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

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Sarah Breedlove, also known as Madam C.J. Walker, born on December twenty-third of eighteen sixty-seven in Delta, Louisiana. Sarah Breedlove is to be considered lucky as to which she was the first child in her family to be a “free-born” from slavery once her parents were allowed to leave. She lived a tragedy at such an early age of seven with the withdrawal of her parents’ lives in this world. Sarah was then later in the custody of her older sister.

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By 1850, most southern women had attended a school of higher education. These schools believed that a proper education prepared these women to be successful plantation mistresses. However, not every young woman was

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The author, Douglas R. Egerton, has his M.A. and Ph.D. from Georgetown University. His grandparents were slaveholders and believed that slaves were property. He became interested in race relations because of grandparents and the television series “Roots”. He specifically concentrates on race relations in the American South. He is now a history professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

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Imagine growing up on a cotton plantation to former slaves in Delta, becoming an “orphan at the age of 7, becoming a wife at the age of 14, a mother at 17 and a widow at 20?” This all describes the early life of Sarah Breedlove, better known as Madam C.J Walker. “She supported her family by washing laundry and she used her earning as a laundress to pay for her daughter’s education at Knoxville College” .In 1889, Madam C.J Walker moved to St. Louis in search of a better future.

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“’Can You Be BLACK and Look at This’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)” by Elizabeth Alexander is a powerful analysis into the deep rooted sense of community felt by people who identify as Black, with specific regards to the videotaped police beating of Rodney King; and also examines the deep rooted White stereotypes surrounding people of color in America, more notably in the judicial system. This essay details the unity and solidarity seen in the times, not only surrounding the Rodney King videos, but also surrounding other notable stories about Black violence, such as the murder of Emmett Till, and the stories of Fredrick Douglass, to name a few. It describes in detail the horrible acts committed on Black bodies, and references numerous movements

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In the case of African women, the larger implication of Snyder’s work is the notion of quieting the voices of enslaved women in regarding to accusing white men of sexual assault. Since speech, which includes gossip as well as testimonies in court, was critical to negotiating the hierarchies in the colon. In addition to this, keeping slaves quiet was crucial to master’s maintaining and strengthening their power. Snyder strongly states that “Virginians cherished the rights of masters more that they did those of husbands.” Snyder as well and Brown conclude that eighteenth century Virginia severely limited the voices of women and continued to display anxiety and discomfort regarding women's forrightness as it posed challenges to white male

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Devin Plascencia HST 2201 Enslavement may have functioned as the single-greatest contributing factor to the economic prosperity of the United States. Even so, enslaved Americans’ experiences were far from singular. Not only did enslaved experiences differ based on the demands of each cash crop – namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton – but also based on the size of slaveholding residencies, urban or rural conditions, and the temperaments of individual enslavers. Historical eras also informed differing slave experiences. Making use of evidence from historians Peter Kolchin and Chandra Manning, I argue that the experiences of enslaved Americans differed between the antebellum period and the Civil War.

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