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List of contents
Preface, ; Foreword, ; Introduction, ; 1 Precursor to the Victorian Age: The Concept of Marriage and Family as Revealed in the Correspondence of the Izard Family of South Carolina, ; 2 Family and Female Identity in the Antebellum South: Sarah Gayle and Her Family, ; 3 "An Outrage upon Nature": Incest and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South, ; 4 "Southern Dishonor": Flesh, Blood, Race, and Bondage, ; 5 "Our Family, White and Black": Family and Household in the Southern Slaveholders' World View, ; 6 Strategies of Survival: Free Negro Families and the Problem of Slavery, ; 7 Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families, 1830-1860, ; 8 Toward a Kinder and Gentler America: The Southern Lady in the Greening of the Politics of the Old South, ; 9 The Clays of Alabama: The Impact of the Civil War on a Southern Marriage, ; 10. House and Home in the Victorian South: The Cookbook as Guide, ; 11. A Family Tradition of Letters: The Female Percys and the Brontean Mode, ; 12. The Political Economy of Sharecropping Families: Blacks and Poor Whites in the Rural South, 1865-1915, ; 13. A Woman Made to Suffer and Be Strong: Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1834-1907, ; 14. A Victorian Father: Josiah Gorgas and His Family, ; Epilogue, ; Appendix for "An Outrage upon Nature" ; Notes ; Contributors
About the author
Carol Bleser is the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Distinguished Professor of American History at Clemson University. Her books include Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, A Southern Slaveholder, The Hammonds of Redcliffe, and The Promised Land.
Summary
In Joy and in Sorrow brings together some of the finest historians of the South in a sweeping exploration of the meaning of the family in this troubled region. In their vast canvas of the Victorian South, the authors explore the private lives of Senators, wealthy planters, and the belles of high society, along with the humblest slaves and sharecroppers, both white and black. Stretching from the height of the antebellum South's pride and power through the chaos of the Civil War and Reconstruction to the end of the century, these essays uncover hidden worlds of the Southern family, worlds of love and duty-and of incest, miscegenation, and insanity. Featuring an introduction by C. Vann Woodward, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mary Chesnut's Civil War, and a foreword by Anne Firor Scott, author of The Southern Lady, this work presents an outstanding array of historians: Eugene Genovese, Catherine Clinton, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Carol Bleser, Drew Faust, James Roark, Michael Johnson, Brenda Stevenson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Jacqueline Jones, Peter Bardaglio, and more. They probe the many facets of Southern domestic life, from the impact of the Civil War on a prominent Southern marriage to the struggles of postwar sharecropper families. One author turns the pages of nineteenth century cookbooks, exploring what they tell us about home life, housekeeping, and entertaining without slaves after the Civil War. Other essays portray the relationship between a Victorian father and his devoted son, as well as the private writings of a long-suffering Southern wife. In Joy and in Sorrow offers a fascinating look into the tangled reality of Southern life before, during, and after the Civil War. With this collection of essays, editor Carol Bleser provides a powerful new way of understanding this most self-conscious
