Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Women At The Loom: Handweaving In Washington County, Tennessee, 1840-1860., Ann Cameron Macrae

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evidence for handweaving in antebellum Washington County, Tennessee. The author examines probate inventories, wills, store ledgers, and census and tax materials to determine the identities of the weavers, the equipment and raw materials available to them, and the kinds of textiles that women wove. The author discusses the reasons many women continued to weave cloth at home although commercially woven textiles were available in local stores.

The author concludes that many of Washington County's antebellum weavers wove as a contribution to the country goods the family bartered at the local store. Others may have been responding …

"A Plea For Color:" The Construction Of A Feminine Identity In African American Women's Novels., Kirsten A. Moffler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writers of slave narratives i n the nineteenth-century manipulated the western sentimental literary tradition to appeal t o a white, predominantly female readership during a time of national ideological division. These writers had their own agendas which often m e t (or were forced to meet ) those of white-run abolitionist movements t o achieve the ultimate goal of abolishing slavery. Northern white-run abolitionist movements were kept warm by the moral fires of mid-nineteenth-century Protestant Christianity; Christian ideals flooded their meetings and publications. Therefore, it is no wonder that the writers of slave narratives are so overt i n discussing …