Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's "Within the Plantation Household" is a classic of its field for a reason. Meticulously researched, this text spans innumerable primary sources, scholarly references, and academic disciplines. For anyone interested in gender, race, or the American South - or for anyone in need of a corrective to the whitewashed mythos of books like Gone With the Wind - this is very much required reading.As this book was published in 1988, I would recommend checking out newer work on women...

Long read but worth it if you are interested in women's history, slave history, southern history... I read this in graduate school and had to write and present a book analysis for the class. I chose this book. Still one of the best reads I had in grad school.

Tantalizing tastes of Southern womanhood slip between the liberal lace of feminist phraseology as Within the Plantation Household begins with a Prologue. I am torn momentarily between the impulse to drop this book and find instead a complete unedited copy of Sarah Haynesworth Gayle’s diary. Chapter one is more of the same minus the diary excerpts. It is a dry chapter of definitions discussing such terminology as “gender,” “race,” and “household.” I am convinced that the author is not herself a S...

Finally, I finished the book. Took me forever. I recommend this for scholars who are interested in the Civil War and the relationship between female slaveholders and female slaves. Very well researched. Reads more like a dissertation.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese explores the female perspective and experience of living in the Old South: incorporating sources that speak to both black and white women. To be completely candid, there does not seem to be very much innovative or surprising here, but I am fairly confident that this is because I do not understand the historiography. Written in 1988, it is quite possible that everything she is saying is being said by a historian for the first time, and that women's perspective in the antebe...

I know that some historians have issues with this book, but I love it. I love the snippets from diaries to give the subjects a voice, and I love how economics creeps in to give more texture to understanding class, race, and gender relations. Fox-Genovese doesn't try to tell the 'whole' story of race and gender in the south, the focus is on plantation life, but it is still an interesting read.

I. Knew. There. Was. Not. Only. Blacks. In_slavery. Its. In. Black. And. White. There. Was. Also. Whites. In_slavery. And. Many. Others. Free. At. Last.

Some of it took some serious slogging through sociology lingo and was pretty dull going, but it was interesting.

Some things to bear in mind when approaching this book: 1. Its publication date. At the time it was written, this was ground-breaking stuff. Actually focus on the lives of female slaves and their white female owners? Whoa, Nelly, pass the smelling salts!2. It is an academic work. The author is a sociologist whose focus is feminism and slavery in the US pre-Civil War era. This is not a prettied up historical fiction; it is historical research. (Or, rather, the result of historical research.) It's...

I really appreciated the political/sociological clarification of the difference between New England homes and Southern households, the Northern roots of the idea of a "woman's sphere" being dependent of the development of men's work away from home. This book is changing the way I read and understand women's diaries from the time, and helping me to begin to grasp the cultural differences between Northern and Southern white women as being certainly bound up with slavery, but also with a whole pate...

I found the actual words of the women from that era to be interesting, although I would have preferred a much more balanced view between the black and white women. I understand that slaves rarely kept journals and such, but there were some well educated black women who fought for their peoples' freedom who gave speeches and such that could have been drawn on for this book. The whole subject was just extremely sad, and it was such a shameful era of our country that if I had not had to read this f...

Hard to read. Not because of content, but the way it was written. I eventually gave up and stopped reading. It took me months to stop reading it. LOL!

Genovese is most in her own when it comes to detail, and she paints a lucid tapestry of the on-the-ground experiences of women, black and white, in the antebellum South. A good piece adding color to more significant considerations of the antebellum South, but bereft of historiographical significance considering subsequent developments in considerations of women and race in the South.

While this seems like an interesting and informative book, it was not an easy read. It felt quite choppy in most places. To me, there was no real flow, so after a few chapters, I ended up skimming and finally putting it down. I have another similar read coming via inter-library soon. I hope it is much easier!

An account of the lives of antebellum slave owning women and black slaves within the plantation household setting. Fox-Genovese uses primarily diaries and letters as her source material to recreate the women's' culture of this particular environment.In the Prologue, she shows that elite white women are able to develop an identity because they had intense and uninterrupted familial ties and networks of friends to buoy them up in hard times (p. 11). Much of this identity, however, was dependant up...

This was a very necessary read for my research purposes but the writing was a little bit dry. It took me a while to get through it.

This is a fascinating study which shows how class, race and gender shaped and dominated women's experiences during the 19th century.

The book talked more about slaveowners' perspective than the slaves, so I found myself often wondering how the slaves thought about something. I had to get used to the academic writing style; the book was a little drier than I like, but it was informative.

This book contrasts the experiences of black and white women in the pre-Civil War South. It contains a great deal of information on a subject that doesn't get all that much attention. I learned a lot from the book and enjoyed it. However, the style is very academic and dense, so I would only recommend it to readers who are very interested in learning about the period.

An in-depth examination of the interwoven lives of Southern women and their female slaves. It isn't all moonlight and magnolias, nor is it all Simon Legree. The text is a bit dry at times, but very informative.