Abstract
Raised in a household immersed in the nineteenth century world of gentility and refinement in the Northeast, Sarah’s gendered identity had been shaped by the social and cultural changes after the Revolutionary period in this region. Her relocation to Clifton Grove, however, implied a cultural reimagining of her sense of self as a woman. Yet this was not so much about sectional differences in relation to understandings of the feminine ideal. The shift of identity in Sarah Hicks Williams’ life from young woman to that of wife occasioned a period of transition as she adjusted to new roles, responsibilities and expectations, implicit in understandings of what it meant to be a married woman drawn from the higher echelons of society in the antebellum world. As Sarah adjusted to life as a married woman she shared many of the concerns common to young women from her class on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The two regions shared a common language over what constituted archetypal womanhood for married women in this period, and yet the existence of two very different economic systems meant that subtle nuances marked the shape and nature of such ideals.
I think my coming South has changed some of my friends more than it has me.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
C. E. Beecher (1842) Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and School. Boston: T. H. Webb & Co, 28, sourced at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi Media Archive, directed by Stephen Railton, www.utc.iath.virginia.edu (October 27, 2011).
June 1840, Godey’s Lady’s Book, sourced at Accessible Archives http://www.accessible.com/accessible/index.jsp (April 12, 2010); C. E. Beecher (1856) A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and School. (New York: Harper and Brothers), sourced at Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books (September 15, 2010);
M. Coxe (1839) The Young Lady’s Companion: In a Series of Letters. Columbus: I.N. Whiting, 259, sourced at Google Books, http://books.google.co.uk/books (September 12, 2011).
C. E. Beecher (1856) A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and School. (New York: Harper and Brothers), 5, sourced at Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books (September 15, 2010); July 1843, Godey’s Lady’s Book, sourced at Accessible Archives, http://www.accessible.com/accessible/index.jsp (April 12, 2010).
L. H. Sigourney (1838) Letters to Mothers. (Hartford: Hudson & Skinner), 9, 10, sourced at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi Media Archive directed by Stephen Railton, www.utc.iath.virginia.edu. (23 September 2010).
J. Locke (1690, 1996) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 Vols. In 1. (New York: Prometheus Books); January 1850 and October 1852, Godey’s Lady’s Book, sourced at Accessible Archives http://www.accessible.com/accessible/index.jsp (9 April 2010).
Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1850, sourced at Accessible Archives, http://www.accessible.com/accessible/index.jsp (April 12, 2010); C. E. Beecher, “Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education: Presented to the Trustees of Hartford Female Seminary and Published at Their Request,” (1829), 54–55, sourced at Google Books, http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Suggestions_respecting_improvements_in_e.html?id=LewK_xCJdCk&redir_esc=y (June 14, 2011);
T. S. Arthur (1850) The Woman at Home, Or leaves from the Every-Day Book of an American Woman. (Philadelphia: W. A. Leary & Co.), 178, sourced at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi Media Archive, directed by Stephen Railton, www.utc.iath.virginia.edu (October 27, 2011);
K. Kish Sklar (1976) Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company), 173.
B. M. Solomon (1985) In the Company o f Educated women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press), 15.
Stowe, “The Rhetoric of Authority,” 929. Discussion of same-sex emotional relationships among students appear to be largely confined to the antebel-lum South. See Farnham, Education of the Southern Belle, esp. Chapter 6 “Sisters: The Development of Sororities” and Chapter 7, “Lovers: Romantic Friendships”; S. M. Stowe (1987) Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of Planters. (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press), Chapter 3, “Coming of Age: Duty and Satisfaction”;
S. M. Stowe (1985) “The Not-So-Cloistered Academy: Elite Women’s Education and Family Feeling in the Old South,” in W. J. Fraser, Jr., F. R. Saunders and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds, The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press), 90–106. For further discussion of same-sex romantic friendships in the antebellum era in both North and South,
see K. V. Hansen (1995) “‘No Kisses is like Youres’: An Erotic Friendship between Two African American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Gender and History, 7, 153–82;
M. S. Buza (1991) “‘Pledges of Our Love’: Friendship, Love and Marriage Among the Virginian Gentry, 1800–1825,” in E. L. Ayers and J. C. Willis, eds, The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth Centwy Virginia. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 9–36;
K. V. Hansen (1992) “‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’: Masculinity and Intimate Culture in Antebellum New England,” in P. Nardi, ed., Men’s Friendships. (California and London: Sage Press), 35–58;
M. Duberman (1980) “‘Writhing Bedfellows’: 1826. Two Young Men from Antebellum South Carolina’s Ruling Elite Share ‘Extravagant Delight.” Journal of Homosexuality, 6:1–2, 85–101;
T. E. Jeffrey (1990) “‘Our Remarkable Friendship’: The Secret Collaboration of Calvin H. Wiley and John W. Cunnigham,” North Carolina Historical Review, 67:1, 28–58;
E. A. Rotundo (1989) “Romantic Friendships: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800–1900,” Journal of Social History, 23:1, 1–25;
R. Jeffreys (1987) “‘Passing the Love of Women’: Manly Love and Victorian Society,” in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America. (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 92–122;
L. Faderman (1985) Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. (London: Women’s Press); Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual.”
For further reading see C. Lasser (1987) “The Domestic Balance of Power: Relations between Mistress and Maid in Nineteenth-Century New England,” Labor History, 28:1, 5–22;
C. Groneman (1978) “Working Class Immigrant Women in Mid Nineteenth Century New York: The Irish Woman’s Experience,” Journal of Urban History, 4:3, 255–73.
A. Urban (2009) “Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900,” Gender and Histoty, 21:2, 263–86.
Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 66. For a discussion of the stereotype of “mammy,” see D. Gray White (1985) Ar’n’t I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. (New York; W. W. Norton and Co.), Chapter 1, “Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery,” 27–61; For further discus-sion on perceptions of immigrants in the antebellum era, esp. the Irish and notions of “otherness,”
see R. Dunne (2002) Antebellum Irish Immigration and Emerging Ideologies of America: A Protestant Backlash. (Lewiston, NJ: Edward Mellon Press);
M. F. Jacobson (1999) Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
D. R. Roediger (1999) The Wages of Whiteness: Race And the Making of the American Working Class. (New York: Verso);
N. Ignatieve (1995) How the Irish Became White. (New York and London: Routledge);
K. A. Miller (1985) Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press);
H. R. Diner (1983) Erin’s Daughter in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press).
C. Smith-Rosenberg (1985) “Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman,” in C. Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 110.
G. Fitzhugh (1854) Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society. (Richmond, VA,: A. Morris), 214. Documenting the American South. 1998. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (May 4, 2010), http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html
G. Fitzhugh (1854) Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society. (Richmond, VA: A. Morris), 246–7. Documenting the American South. 1998. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html (May 4, 2010).
G. Fitzhugh (1854) Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society. (Richmond, VA: A. Morris), 213. Documenting the American South. 1998. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html (May 4, 2010).
For further reading on slaveholder’s control of enslaved worship and religios-ity and enslaved resistance to that control, see E. F. Frazier (1964) The Negro Church in America, 1894–1962. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press);
D. G. Matthews (1965) “The Methodist Mission to the Slaves, 1829–1844,” Journal of American History 51:4, 615–31; Matthews, Religion in the Old South;
A. J. Raboteau (1978) Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South. (New York and Oxford: University of Oxford Press);
M. Sobel (1979) Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith. (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press);
C. W. Joyner (1984) Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press);
K. K. Bailey (1987) “Protestantism and Afro-Americans in the Old South: Another Look,” Journal of Southern History 41:4, 451–472;
T. J. Little (1995) “George Lisle and the Rise of Independent Black Baptist Churches in the Lower South and Jamaica,” Slavery and Abolition, 16, 188–204;
W. C. Johnson (1997) “A Delusive Clothing: Christian Conversion in the Antebellum Slave Community,” The Journal of Negro History, 82, 298–311;
S. R. Frey and B. Wood (1998) Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and the Caribbean. (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press);
R. J. Fraser (2007) Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina. (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press), Chapter 2, “Asking Master Mack to Court: Spheres of Influence” and Chapter 5, “A Red Satin Ribbon Tied Around my Finger: The Meaning of the Wedding Ceremony.”
J. Creech (1979) History of Greene County, North Carolina. (Louisville, KY: Gateway Press), 188. According to Creech the Williams’ house at Clifton Grove burned down in 1945.
1 June 1860, SFHW, fol. 6, 1856–68. For further reading concerning the lives of enslaved children and that of their elite white counterparts in the antebel-lum South, see S. Mintz (2004) Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press);
M. Jenkins Schwartz (2000) Born in Bondage: Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press);
W. King (1995) Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America. (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press);
E. Fox-Genovese (1988) Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press), especially Chapter 3, “Between Big House and Slave Community,” 146–91.
W. King, ed. (1993) A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, 1856–1876, (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press), 100, 115.
See C. Clinton (2000) Fanny Kemble’s Civil War. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 178–80, quote from p.178. For further reading see Kemble, Journal;
C. Clinton, ed. (2000) Fanny Kemble’s Journals. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press).
L. B. Hewgley (1985) The Lott Book. (Manchester, TN: privately published).
Copyright information
© 2013 Rebecca J. Fraser
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fraser, R.J. (2013). An Identity in Transit: From “True Woman” to “Southern Lady”. In: Gender, Race and Family in Nineteenth Century America. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291851_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291851_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33650-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29185-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)