¶ … Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South," by Victoria E. Bynum. Specifically, it will look at why I found the book to be interesting and valuable for research on how women lived in the Old South.
UNRULY WOMEN: A REVIEW
Unruly Women" is more than just a book about how women lived in the South in the 19th century. It is a graphic history of how husbands, masters, and owners treated their women. It is a tale of women who did not fit in their society, and how society regarded them. It is the story of black women, and white women, and how they considered each other, and interacted with the men in their lives. It is often fascinating, and often disturbing. Bynum has taken a difficult subject, and made the reader want to learn more. Bynum herself says in the Introduction, "Why should historians interested in the dynamics of power and politics in the antebellum South investigate this politically powerless minority of women? This book addresses these questions by examining three broad categories of women who behaved in atypical fashion" (Bynum 1).
Throughout the book, Bynum consistently shows that women have always maintained a different social position than men, and it has usually been based on their gender and sexuality. Women attain these positions in a wide variety of ways, from using marriage as a stepping-stone, to creating their own roles defined by their sexuality. "For example, Mary Jenkins Chambers, the mistress of a planter household, had worked her way into the highest echelons of southern society through the time-honored fashion of 'marrying up.' In 1831, while still a teenager, she married Joseph Hart, only to become widowed before her twenty-first birthday. In 1834, she married Elijah Barnett, whom she also outlived, and she married her final husband, Asa Chambers, of Montgomery County, at the age of forty-one in 1856. As the owner of twenty-one slaves and eight hundred acres of land, Chambers was one of Montgomery...
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