Braided Relations, Entwined Lives
The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10034703 |
|---|---|
| Authors | STEPHANIE M H CAMP (University of Washington, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 862-863 |
| Publication date | 2006-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/4486457 |
| OpenAlex | W2025813760 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Cynthia M. Kennedy's carefully researched Braided Relations, Entwined Lives examines the lives and interrelationships of four groups of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Charlestonians: enslaved women, free laboring white women, free black and brown women, and elite slaveholding women. In exacting detail, Kennedy digs up how each group of women worked, engaged with men in intimate relations (such as marriage and unmarried liaisons), and played. Above all, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives analyzes the agency these women had in constructing and reconstructing real and imagined roles for themselves in Charleston, South Carolina. As much as Kennedy is interested in Charleston per se, she is also interested in using the variety of groups of women in early national Charleston as a prism through which to view the “overlaid and interrelated” quality of the social categories of “gender, race, color, condition and class” (p. 1). Kennedy's inclusion of “color” and “condition” is especially important in Charleston, which had a small but hardly insignificant free “brown elite” population (free women of color constituted between 2 and 5 percent of the city's overall population between 1820 and 1860, and free men of color between 2 and 3 percent). Kennedy has written a true study of “southern women” in that she has struggled to represent women whose situations differed dramatically: from those who worked and had little leisure (enslaved women and, to a somewhat lesser extent, most white and black laboring women) to those who had abundant leisure and worked little (urban slaveholding women, who, Kennedy points out, differed from their elite country cousins in the extent of their leisure time)
Agency (philosophy · Elite · Geography · Political science · Politics · Population · Race (biology · Social science · Sociology · South carolina · White (mutation · Women of color · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2006 - 2022 (17) |
| Highly cited | No |