Many subscribers of Va-Hist will certainly find this on-line review and
the authors response of interest. Please respect the letter and the
spirit of the copyright notice at the end of the review.

BT

-----Original Message-----
From: H-NET List for Southern History [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Ian Binnington, H-South
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 11:13 AM
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Subject: Crosspost: H-SHEAR Review, Kenzer on Wood, _Masterful Women_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (May 2005)

Kirsten E. Wood. _Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American
Revolution through the Civil War_. Gender and American Culture Series.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
xiii + 281 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2859-9; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5528-6.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Robert C. Kenzer, University of Richmond

Mastering Widow Masters

Anyone who has ever researched the history of American widowhood knows
that the topic of Kirsten E. Wood's book is a difficult one. There
simply is no single source that inventories all widows in the nation, a
region, a state, or a community, let alone those who owned slaves.
Therefore, Wood should be credited for investigating this challenging
topic and tracing it over a fairly long span of time. While the title
does not indicate that her study focuses just on Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia, this geographic limit does not impede the
significance of her findings.

Wood begins by pointing to the example of Martha Washington, the
nation's "first" First Lady, who also became a slaveholding widow.
Wood asks what happened to the many Southern women like Martha, who,
though less prominent, became widows with slaves between the American
Revolution and the end of the Civil War. Were they able to preserve
their husband's economic, social and political status? After their
husbands died did they truly become masters not just of their slaves
but, as well, their personal fate?

One factor which makes it possible for Wood to disclose information
about these widows is that, while most were not large slaveowners, as
members of slave-owning families they were likely to be literate and
thereby produce manuscripts that many years later would make their way
into an archive. Hence, Wood has carefully researched diaries and
correspondence of these widows, particularly those housed in the
Southern Historical Collection, the Duke University Archives, the South
Caroliniana Library, and the Virginia Historical Society. Further, Wood
relies on a number of published studies, most notably Suzanne Lebsock's
_The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town,
1784-1860_ (1984), to fill in critical gaps.

Wood's most critical finding is that slaveholding widows "developed a
distinctive version of mastery, which harnessed ladyhood to householding
and privileged both over mere white manhood" (p. 6) She concludes that
these women "provided a conservative counterpoint to the patriarchal and
potentially democratic mastery espoused by yeoman and male planters" (p.
11).

While Wood begins her study with the late-eighteenth century, tracing
some of the changes brought about by the Revolution, and concludes with
a chapter on the Civil War, most of the chapters are topical rather than
chronological. Chapter 2, which examines how widows managed slaves,
provides particularly interesting analysis of the differences between
small and large slaveholding widows. Woods points out that a widow with
few slaves experienced a far greater loss with her husband's death since
he likely would have been providing a substantial amount of his labor to
that of the slaves. She also explains how slave widows differed from
male slaveholders as the former "often measured their personal success
or failure more in terms of house slaves' performance" (p. 36). Further,
slave widows (whether large or small owners) were less likely than men
to "assert their power over slaves in raw physical terms" and "sexual
domination or its threat did not commonly figure in their mastery."
Significantly, while these factors might suggest a more "moderate form
of slavery" under the management of these widows, she finds that "slaves
often fared no better or even worse than before" the death of the
husband-master since his death often necessitated the selling of slaves.
Further, financial retrenchment frequently forced these widows to
diminish the physical conditions under which their slaves labored.
On the whole, Wood concludes, that as slave managers, widows "were not
fully successful masters, but neither were they benevolent ladies or
hapless incompetents" (p. 59).

Chapter 3 describes the interaction of these widows with their
relatives.
Wood notes that widows received such aid as co-residence, but also
emphasizes that many "tried to help families as much as they were
helped"
(p. 67). She observes that one significant advantage widows had over
wives was with regards to the law, as they were now entitled to testify
in court- an invaluable right which could assist their relatives.

Chapter 4 outlines how these slaveholding widows navigated the public
realm, particularly the economy. Again, it not only underscores the role
of kin assistance, but delineates how these women both used agents in
commercial exchanges and sometimes even served as agents. Further,
because most of these women had access to good means of travel and
accommodations, the risks they might encounter while traveling were
diminished.

In chapter 5 Wood traces the public influence of slaveholding widows in
formal and informal politics. Wood discovers that over this era a shift
occurred as there was a growing tendency among the planter class to
"uphold elite privilege across lines of gender, contrary to the
democratic implications of universal white manhood suffrage"
(p. 116).

Wood investigates the many choices the slaveholding women made from
whether to remarry to how to disperse their estates, in chapter 6.
She finds that only a minority of these women remarried and that the
older and more wealthy ones were most likely to remain single. Her most
significant finding, based on her careful use of the wills of Rowan
County, North Carolina, is that slaveholding women privileged their
female heirs and in doing so "acknowledged both their emotional
investment in other women and the peculiar hazards of widowhood"
(p. 135). She concludes that widows "found special value in their female
networks even though as widows they relied heavily on men for financial,
legal, and managerial help" (p. 135). Still, she stresses that these
women were "fundamentally conservative" as they "endorsed not only the
South's racial and class hierarchies but also its fundamental gender
inequality. Indeed, they relied upon it" (p. 157).

Taking her story into the war years in chapter 7, Wood explains that
slaveholding widows experienced the difficulties faced by all white
women and civilians during this period. Still, it was the loss of their
slaves which especially hurt them since it had been their slave
management "that secured their respect and authority in the eyes of
friends, families, and subordinates" (p. 190).

As previously noted, examining the history of American widows is a
difficult task. Even though these slaveholding widows were more likely
than most women to leave the types of sources that reveal their thoughts
and actions, there is reason to think that most of those who did were
the larger slaveowners rather than the vast majority who owned few
slaves. This is not intended as a criticism of Wood who shows
sensitivity to the issue of representativeness as well as the need to
provide statistical evidence whenever possible. Indeed, there simply is
no consistent source indicating how many slaves these women owned either
at the time of their husband's death or at the moment they wrote a diary
entry or a letter. Further, it is impossible for Wood to examine larger
demographic patterns as well, such as the number of children these women
had at the time of their husband's death, since before 1850 the
manuscript census does not give the type of family-oriented information
which would make this possible.[1] Again, Wood deserves credit for
pushing her analysis back into a period when the records are too thin to
answer many of these questions. We can only hope that Wood's excellent
study will stimulate more examinations of nineteenth- century American
widows that will permit additional regional, urban/rural, and class
comparisons.

Note

[1]. For an examination of Virginia widows during a period when the
records allow for more statistical analysis, see Robert C. Kenzer,
"'Knowing the Uncertainty of Life & the Certainty of Death': A Profile
of Virginia's Civil War Widows," in _The War Was You and Me: Civilians
in the American Civil War_, ed. Joan E. Cashin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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Reply to Robert C. Kenzer, by Kirsten E. Wood

First, I would like to thank Professor Kenzer for his generous review.
I'm especially pleased that he draws attention to the difficulty of
studying American widows. As I have learned from Latin Americanist
colleagues, other historians are often surprised about how little
demographic information was ever collected for the early U.S. (and how
little of that survives for some locales). While painstakingly close
study of a particular town or county can yield a great deal of
information about marriages, births, and deaths, compiling accurate
estimates over larger geographic areas is difficult and sometimes even
impossible. Locating individuals can be even more difficult. Early in my
study, I started trying to find census records for individual widows
whom I had encountered through reading family papers. Most of the time,
I could not. Some might say that is proof that such women were not
considered household heads, but the numbers of other women who did
appear as householders and slaveholders in the manuscript census records
I sampled suggest otherwise. (In any event, a census taker's
observations need not have matched the day-to-day reality of a
particular household and community, not least because legal title to
land did not march in lockstep with functional authority. As slaves well
knew, a widow might technically own neither them nor the land on which
they labored, but still be in charge of both for years on end.) Instead
of attempting a quantitative (or legalistic) study, I relied heavily on
sources left by the literate. Diaries, letters, wills, and especially
the countless slips of paper that documented economic transactions built
up into a picture of female mastery through widowhood. I hope that my
findings are intriguing--or controversial--enough to encourage further
study of widowhood in other areas of the early nineteenth century, North
and South. After all, as Kenzer points out, my study explores only the
southeastern states, rather than the entire "Old South"--something I
could find no sufficiently deft way to indicate in my title but which I
hope is clear in the introduction.

Kenzer's review also reminds me that an author's idea of what her book
is "really about" does not necessarily determine how readers perceive
it. For most of the years I worked on the project, I would have said
that it was "really about" mastery and that my widowed subjects were in
a sense a means to an end. That is, I had not decided first to study
widows, and then settled on this group. Rather, I wanted to look at
gender and power in the Old South, and I came up with slaveholding
widows. This distinction speaks, I think, to a tension between being a
woman's historian and a historian of gender. The two are not unrelated,
of course, but they are not the same either. From the first, I intended
my study to test (and, I hoped, challenge) what southern historians were
writing about householding, slavery, and patriarchy in the Old South.
But that leaning towards "gender" was sometimes defensive and perhaps
had always been: how could I possibly justify my topic unless my group
of women told us about something else more important? Bringing still
more complexity to our already fractured generalizations about women's
history apparently was not enough; gender offered more integrative
promise, it seemed. Yet over time, I realized that I also had to think
about widowhood as a category and to think comparatively across space
and time, even if (or especially if) that played into the hands of those
who decried fragmentation. Some might argue that I did not do this
enough, in terms either of region or of socioeconomic differences among
slaveholders, and they might be right. Nonetheless, thinking about the
different labor arrangements of richer and poorer slaveholders and of
northern and southern farmers, for example, helped me clarify the core
importance of both unfree labor and overall wealth to slaveholding
widows. With questions more deeply rooted in comparative women's
history, I would very likely have come to other conclusions, and I would
certainly have structured the book differently. But I like to think that
the picture of widows' ability--and responsibility--to manage households
and slaves would still have been as clear and still, I trust, as
provocative, both for southern historians and for scholars of widowhood
and women more broadly.

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