How women of diverse color, condition, and wealth sustained power relations in urban slave society.

"[A] stunning, deeply researched, and gracefully written social history." —Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa

This study of women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, looks at the roles of women in an urban slave society. Cynthia M. Kennedy takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. She analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny and where at the same time people of color and white people mingled daily. Kennedy's study examines the lives of the women of Charleston and the variety of their attempts to negotiate the web of social relations that ensnared them.

"

Rejecting the clash between the categories of race, class, and gender for analytical supremacy, Kennedy (Clarion Univ.) has written a detailed, nuanced study of the lives of women—white and black, free and unfree—in Colonial and antebellum Charleston. As the title suggests, the women of Charleston, regardless of station, were bound together in a remarkably complex web of social relations, and how women experienced their lives was determined in large part by how they negotiated this intricate web. Embedded in this web was a ubiquitous notion of the ideal woman, which was defined by the prevailing patriarchy. While they sometimes chafed against this ideal, women also used it to their advantage, individually and collectively. Change also affected the lives of women in Charleston: the Revolution marked an expansion of what women believed they had a right to expect, legally and socially, and further complicated relationships between women by reinvigorating slavery. Kennedy draws upon the now expansive body of scholarship on Southern women's history and the history of slavery and concentrates on the unique urban setting of Charleston to illuminate new dimensions of women's history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper—division undergraduates and abov

"

. . . Kennedy . . . has written a detailed, nuanced study of the lives of women—white and black, free and unfree—in Colonial and antebellum Charleston. . . . [She] draws upon the now expansive body of scholarship on Southern women's history and the history of slavery and concentrates on the unique urban setting of Charleston to illuminate new dimensions of women's history. . . . Recommended.