Summary Of Masterful Women By Woods

Kirsten E. Woods wrote Masterful Women. This book was published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2003, and is a nonfiction historical book that is 198 pages long, without the notes and focuses on the struggles and accomplishments of slaveholding widows during the American Revolution through the Civil War (1765-1865). Women didn’t have any major rights until they were widowed, due to women being viewed as vulnerable and fully dependent on men. In this book, Kirsten Woods argues that women were viewed as dependent on men and they could not do anything for themselves. As a reader goes on through this book women prove that this statement is incorrect and women can therefore do most everything that a man can do. Before being widowed,

If someone asks about a slaveholding widow, most will say Martha Washington, but there were many more. The reason why these women are not acknowledged is because they did not have the social status like Martha Washington did, due to her husband’s social standing as president. These women went through the same difficult things as Martha, such as dealing with a death, slaves, and sometimes businesses or crops. For example Martha Cocke went through a tough grievance over her husband and wrote to her sister saying that she was thinking about suicide due to stress. She got through her grievance and decided to pay rent for a farm, where slaves could work. Some of the women around her thought that she would fail at doing this, but she proved them

Widows showed that this statement was incorrect and women are not dependent on men as much as originally thought but maybe just a little bit. Which explains the rights difference between men and women. Through American history, widow’s rights have changed, because at first widows did not have any rights and their lives depended on how much power and land their husbands gave them through their wills. This meaning that women were given a dower, or a share of her husband’s estate, and they could either get more property than they were allowed or under that amount if her husband didn’t think that she was responsible enough. Those who got more of a dower that extra property was usually their children’s, if they had any. These women were usually familiar with managing the house before they were widowed, because the men could be away for months at a time for business and the women were in charge of the household. Even though it may sound like the women were free to do whatever they wanted, they did not really have a say in what they did, because their husbands were writing letters to them, telling them what to do, when, and how. Most of the time these tasks were paying bills, or going and socializing with the women around them to gain social