Soul Murder and White Women’s Agency: Gender as a Primary Category of Analysis

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Thavolia Glymph examines the power relations between black and white women within the plantation household over the antebellum years, throughout wartime, and into the postbellum era. Her work takes a sometimes dizzying, hybrid approach to violence in the plantation household that combines gender and race as analytical categories. Such an approach achieves one of Glymph’s goals to revise the feminist historiography of the American South, albeit in a way that forces the reader (at times) to trudge through the mud to understand arguments that are, in reality, disguisedly simplistic. These extremely influential arguments are at a basic level: white women held power as slave-owners; they operated in a public sphere, even in their own homes; they experienced a struggle between the southern perception of lady hood and their need for slaves to help them achieve that ideal; the transformation of the plantation household was a major step in black women’s fight for freedom; and black women used what power they had after emancipation to create change in plantation households.

Most of my questions and commentary on Glymph’s work come from the early chapters of Out of the House of Bondage, mirroring my interest in the lives of both enslaved women and mistresses in the antebellum period. Glymph’s use of a mixture of analytical tools, specifically race and gender, should be considered with care in light of her desire to catalyze change in the feminist historiography of the American South. She avoids the use of only gender as an analytical category to create a more even-handed interpretation of the struggle between women in the plantation household: “Unfortunately, gender wielded as a primary category of historical analysis often obscures as much as it reveals of the nature of social relations between free and enslaved, white and black women, in the plantation household.”[1] To alleviate the inherently narrowed lens Glymph identifies in choosing gender as a primary analytical category, she turns to race. While this approach tells a story of power relations between white and black women in the American South, it doesn’t necessarily revise the feminist scholarship in the field. Perhaps Glymph doesn’t intend to reinvent the use of gender as a primary analytical category, but her inclusion of a historiographical essay on its use (Chapter 1: The Gender of Violence) indicates that she does, indeed, seek to change the trajectory of the field. Her solution to the ills of using gender as a primary category of analysis, then, is to not use the category primarily at all.

Is Glymph’s method the only way to avoid the missteps of using primary categories of historical analysis? The reality of white women’s experiences in the patriarchal America South, which are acknowledged by Glymph, indicate that it might be possible to use gender as a primary category of analysis. Much of Glymph’s criticism of historians that do use gender as their lens for understanding the antebellum American South is that overall “white women’s agency has been profoundly underestimated.”[2] While this may be true, the use of gender as an analytical category may not be the root of such shortsightedness. Glymph defends her arguments about women’s power as slaveholders well, but these arguments only consider in part the brutalizing effect of American slavery on white women in the South. Glymph considers the plight of those women – their husbands’ sexual exploitation of enslaved women, frivolous spending habits, and recklessness, along with the conflict between their expectations as Southern ladies and the realities of plantation household management – but does so in spite of an overarching sentiment that their violence was a result of their power and identity as slave-owners.  As Nell Painter reveals in her article “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward A Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” scholars can write entire works before considering the effects of patriarchy and slavery on the master class. On page twenty-two of twenty-five, Painter concedes that “[s]o far in this discussion, only slaves have figured as the victims of physical and psychological abuse. But the ideals of slavery affected families quite apart from the toll they exacted from the bodies and psyches of blacks.”[3] Painter encourages historians to be wary of “the gorgeous surface that cultured slave owners presented to the world,” advice Glymph’s work exemplifies. However, Painter includes the abuse of white women in the factors contributing to soul murder throughout the American South. If white women had unique experiences of slavery because of their womanhood, their subjection to patriarchy, and their vulnerability to soul murder, then the use of gender as an analytical category is not one that must be combined with other categories if historians want to avoid a shortsighted interpretation that is overly sympathetic to the master class.