Supervisors, And Peach Stealing Bitches

Homemakers, Supervisors, and Peach Stealing Bitches: the role of overseers’ wives on slave plantations in eighteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina is a riveting research paper written by Keele University lecturer, Laura Sandy. In the aforementioned paper, Sandy argues that even though it is rarely discussed in history classes and are less prominent in historical records, the poorer white women married to the overseers of the plantations had a much larger influence on plantation society than one may have thought. Sandy starts off by saying that despite common belief, the overseers were often married, in order to deter relations between slaves and the supervisors. However, the wives had a much more important role than sexual barrier. This

This first raises the question if these lower class white women had any role on the plantation whatsoever, other than the blockade between overseer-slave relations. Studies have shown that the work of these women exceeds the expectations of normal housework, expanding to include producing the goods that the family needs to survive. Despite doing the skills and good work acquired by these women, the planters and even sometimes the slaves would degrade these women. Often times, the owners of the plantations saw the overseers as troublesome lowlifes and their wives and children were just extra mouths to feed. There was a level of inequality between the plantation owners and the labor managers, despite the fact that both were white. Such as in the case with Tom Freshwater’s family, who were caught red-handed stealing peaches and earned the name “mad bitches” by the planter (Sandy 477). The author of this article also mentions that, according to the journal of a plantation owner, overseers and their wives would often abuse their power by overstepping their “stations.” Between stealing from the owners of the plantations in order to make their ends meet and getting involved with the laborers, potentially violent at times, the role of the overseer’s partner was not necessarily a glamorous position to

Despite the stigma of the wives to be extra mouths to feed, ¬many of these wives would make the food, soap, clothes, and even shoes for not only her family, but also to sell to other families in the area. Alongside this, the wives were employed to take care of the dairies, teach the slave women and girls how to spin thread, make cloth, and act as midwives and nurses to any and all peoples on the plantation. Because of this extra activity and larger role on the plantation, many of the women worked alongside their husbands, rather than beneath. (Sandy 488). For many of these couples, the role of both the man and the women created the perfect training period before they could save up enough money to buy their own land and hire their own slaves. The wives of the plantation supervisors brought social and economic opportunities to plantation life along with domestic stability. For these reasons, the overseer’s wife can be viewed as more than just “peach stealing