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A Season In Town: Plantation Women And The Urban South, 1790-1877, Marise Bachand

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What did the city mean for plantation women in the slaveholding South? This dissertation documents how a privileged group of women experienced and represented urban space in a society primarily defined by its rurality. From the very beginning of colonization and until the end of slavery, cities like Charleston and New Orleans occupied a key place in the lives of these women. Bridging the artificial gap between country and city present in the historiography, this study revises the plantation mythology, which contends that plantation mistresses rarely went to town, and when there, they seldom ventured beyond the domestic space. After …