This volume gathers nearly half of some 300 letters written by Mary Telfair of Savannah to her best friend, Mary Few of New York. Telfair was born in 1790 to a wealthy, prominent, slaveholding Savannah family. Few, born in 1790 into equally affluent circumstances, moved with her family from Savannah to New York in 1799. Self-exiled because of their strong antislavery views, the Fews never returned to Georgia, yet they remained close to the Telfairs. The close friendship between Telfair and Few ended only with their deaths in the 1870s. Regular travelers, they met on many occasions. Chiefly, however, they kept in touch through frequent correspondence (Few's letters to Telfair remain undiscovered, and may not have not survived). Wherever Telfair happened to be--in Savannah, the northern states, or Europe--she wrote to her friend at least two or three times a month. Telfair's letters offer unique insights into the daily life of her family and the changes wrought by the deaths of so many of its members. The letters also reveal the shared interests and imperatives at the base of her various relationships with elite women, but especially with Mary Few, whom Telfair memorably described as her "Siamese Twin." The two women, neither of whom ever wed, nonetheless discussed the rights and obligations of marriage as well as their own state of "single blessedness." They also conversed about shared intellectual interests--literature, lecture topics, women's education--as well as the foibles of common acquaintances. Here is a fascinating, unfamiliar world as revealed in what editor Betty Wood calls "one of the most remarkable literary exchanges between women of high social rank in the early national and antebellum United States."

A broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in the slaveholding South Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South investigates the lives of unmarried white women—from the pre- to the post-Civil War South—within a society that placed high value on women's marriage and motherhood. Marie S. Molloy examines female singleness to incorporate non-marriage, widowhood, separation, and divorce. These single women were not subject to the laws and customs of coverture, in which females were covered or subject to the governance of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and therefore lived with greater autonomy than married women. Molloy contends that the Civil War proved a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes for these women. Being a single woman during this time often meant living a nuanced life, operating within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions while manipulating them to greater advantage. Singleness was often a route to autonomy and independence that over time expanded and reshaped traditional ideals of southern womanhood. Molloy delves into these themes and their effects through the lens of the various facets of the female life: femininity, family, work, friendship, law, and property. By examining letters and diaries of more than three hundred white, native-born, southern women, Molloy creates a broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in both the urban and plantation slaveholding South. She concludes that these women were, in various ways, pioneers and participants of a slow, but definite process of change in the antebellum era.

A richly illustrated, accessibly written book with a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, it includes a mix of thematic essays focusing on individual people, events, and places.

This insightful and beautifully illustrated book offers the first feminist analysis of the phenomenon of women art collectors in America. Dianne Sachko Macleod brings a surprising paradox to light, showing that collecting, which provided wealthy women with a private sense of solace, also liberated them to venture into the public sphere and make a lasting contribution to the emerging American culture. Beginning in the antebellum period, continuing through the Gilded Age, and reaching well into the twentieth century, Macleod shows how elite women enlisted the objets d'art and avant-garde paintings in their collections in causes ranging from the founding of modern museums to the campaign for women's suffrage.

The Bulloch women of Roswell, Georgia, were not typical antebellum Southern belles. Most were well educated world travelers skilled at navigating social circles far outside the insular aristocracy of the rural South. Their lives were filled with intrigue, espionage, scandal, adversity and perseverance. During the Civil War they eluded Union spies on land and blockaders at sea and afterwards they influenced the national debate on equal rights for women. The impact of their Southern ideals increased exponentially when they integrated into the Roosevelt family of New York. Drawing on primary sources, this book provides new insight into the private lives of the women closely linked with the Bulloch family. They include four first ladies, a Confederate spy, the mother of President Teddy Roosevelt and a number of his closest confidants. Nancy Jackson, the family's nursemaid slave, is among the less well known but equally fascinating Bulloch women.

This flowing, instantly engaging narrative tells the story of Savannah from the hopeful arrival of its first permanent English settlers in 1733 to the uncertainties faced by its Civil War survivors in 1865. Alongside the many women and men of European, African, and Native American heritage who helped shaped Savannah's first century and a half, Walter J. Fraser Jr. also shows how war, disease, market forces, fire, and other circumstances left their marks on the city and its people. Among other major developments in Savannah's history, Fraser recalls the hardships of its first residents; the depredations of the Revolutionary War; the relocation of Georgia's capital away from the city; the growth of commerce through railroads and steamships; the establishment of public institutions such as the Female Asylum for orphaned and abandoned girls, and the Poor House and Hospital; and the emergence of public education, a professional police force, and other elements of an urban infrastructure. More than any previous history of the city, Savannah in the Old South points out how whites and blacks, bondpeople and free men and women often interacted in ways that smoothed away the rough edges of racism. From Savannah's physical layout to its cosmopolitan culture, from its social services network to its racially diverse poor neighborhoods, the city offered opportunities for daily contact between blacks and whites that did not exist in the surrounding rural areas. By the eve of the Civil War, Savannah had become Georgia's major commercial and cultural center and the region's sixth largest city. The story of its remarkable growth is told herewith an eye for telling facts and human drama.

This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.