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Glymph, Thavolia

Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household

Cambridge (New York)

2008



OUR SYNOPSIS: Thavolia Glymph pieces together “the day-to-day practices of domination and its corresponding discontents within the antebellum, wartime, and postbellum plantation households,” emphasizing the roles of women. (1) She argues that homemust not be seen as a private realm, that the plantation household was inherently public since enslaved people represented the public. In this realm white women violently exerted the full powers of enslavement. Crucially, she shows that enslaved women boldly fought back. Household privacy was removed with emancipation, making this public realm fully visible. When enslaved people seized their freedom, she shows, “The transformation of the plantation household (and sometimes its literal destruction), with its claims to domesticity and civilization and violence, was a major goal of freedom as slaves understood it.” (6)

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • What are the implications of framing the plantation household as a public rather than private space? How did this change how freedom, slavery, and gender roles were experienced?

  • How did the subordination white women experienced as women affect how they experienced resistance from the people they enslaved?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “The violence and humiliation that marked white women’s treatment of enslaved women raised implacable barriers between them and tempered the very meaning of womanhood in the South. What did it mean to be a southern woman? How, out of the bramble of hate and terror, subjection and fear, did white and black women of the South construct and reconstruct their identities, their notions of what it meant to be female, their ideas about citizenship and freedom? For these endeavors, what did it mean that mistresses might have limited legal rights to divorce and could be beaten by masters, but that they could own slaves whom they could beat? Or, that enslaved women had hand-sawed-up backs or backs that looked like chokeberry trees? The antebellum South was a world, ultimately, that neither white nor black women could easily abide.” (61)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

  • N/A

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