Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South

This is the first study of 19th-century Appalachian women. Wilma A. Dunaway moves beyond the black-white dichotomy and the preoccupation with affluent females that handicap antebellum women's histories. By comparing white, American Indian, free black, and enslaved females, she argues that the nature of a woman's work was determined by her race, ethnicity, and/or class positions. Concomitantly, the degree to which laws shielded her family from disruption depended upon her race, her class, and the degree to which she adhered to patriarchal conventions about work and cross-racial liaisons.

Author: Wilma A. Dunaway
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/10/2008
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.19h x 6.47w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780521886192

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2008 pg. 172
Choice 02/01/2009

About the Author
Dunaway, Wilma A.: - Wilma A. Dunaway was born into an interracial family in east Tennessee in 1944. For more than two decades, she worked in civil rights and public services organizations in the Appalachian region. At present, she is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dunaway is a specialist in international slavery studies, Native American studies, Appalachian studies, and world-system analysis. Her dissertation about the incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the capitalist world economy was awarded a Wilson Fellowship and the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. She has won several awards for her previous three works on Appalachia and slavery, including two Weatherford Awards. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in numerous history and social science journals.