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Stepping lively in place : the not-married, free women of Civil-War-era Natchez, Mississippi / Joyce Linda Broussard.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Broussard, Joyce Linda, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Single women--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Single women.
- Divorced women--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Divorced women.
- Widows--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Widows.
- Women, White--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Women, White.
- African American women--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- African American women.
- Free African Americans--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Free African Americans.
- Women--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Women.
- Sex role--Mississippi--Natchez--History--19th century.
- Sex role.
- History.
- Natchez (Miss.)--Social conditions--19th century.
- Natchez (Miss.).
- Natchez (Miss.)--Race relations--History--19th century.
- Mississippi--Natchez.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (xvi, 338 pages)
- Place of Publication:
- Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2016]
- System Details:
- text file
- Summary:
- Enlivened With Profiles and Vignettes of some of the remarkable people whose histories inform this book, Stepping Lively in Place shows how free, single women navigated life in a busy slave-based river-port town before and during the Civil War and how those women transitioned during Reconstruction, emancipation, and thereafter. It examines how free, single women in one city (including prostitutes, entrepreneurs, and elite plantation ladies) coped with life unencumbered, or unprotected, by husbands. The book pays close attention to the laws affecting southern gender and sociocultural traditions, focusing especially on how the town's free, single women maneuvered adroitly but guardedly within the ever-evolving legal arena in which they lived. Joyce Linda Broussard looks at all types of free, single women-black and white, law-abiding and criminal-including spinsters, widows, divorcees, and abandoned women. She demonstrates the nuanced degrees to which these women understood that the legal, cultural, and social traditions of their place and time could alternately constrain or empower them, thereby achieving considerable independence as women. Before the Civil War, says Broussard, the town's patriarchal community tolerated (often reluctantly) even the most independent-minded (and often disorderly) free, single women-as long as their behavior left unchallenged the institutions of white male mastery, slavery, and marriage. She explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the town's single women, especially when thousands of formerly enslaved women and new widows swelled their ranks. With slavery dead and male authority undermined, Broussard demonstrates how the not-married women of postbellum Natchez confronted a world turned inside out with a determinedly resolute dexterity. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- A note on terminology
- Antebellum Natchez : the place in which they stepped
- Stepping lively amid their shadows : the single white women of antebellum Natchez
- Stepping out on their own : the divorcing women of antebellum Natchez
- Stepping beyond their husbands' graves : the widows of antebellum Natchez
- Stepping lively in place : the Free-Black, not-married women of antebellum Natchez
- Stepping lively at the edge : the disorderly, not-married women of antebellum Natchez
- Stepping through the tumult : not-married women in Confederate and Yankee-occupied Natchez
- Stepping into the breach : the women of postbellum Natchez
- single and married, black and white
- Stepping through the ruins : personal sketches
- Epilogue.
- Notes:
- "A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund publication"--Title page verso.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Electronic reproduction. New York Available via World Wide Web.
- Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 17, 2017).
- Other Format:
- Print version: Broussard, Joyce Linda. Stepping lively in place.
- ISBN:
- 9780820348988
- 0820348988
- Publisher Number:
- 99984980631
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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