Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. 324. $55.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.

Extract

Each of the 13 essays in this volume considers an aspect of female participation in the paid or unpaid labor force of the antebellum American south. The work of ordinary women is the theme that unites the essays, work the editors in their introduction note was often unacknowledged due to prevailing and evolving attitudes about women's proper work and the role of the male head of household as the family breadwinner. The essays vary widely in their scope, but share a search for ingenious sources of information, a search necessitated by the invisibility of women in official and more conventional sources. The topics range from Native American female makers and sellers of baskets to antebellum female iron manufacturing workers, from coastal Savannah slave women participants in produce markets to western Virginia businesswomen, from Richmond prostitutes to New Orleans nuns.