Mississippi Quarterly

LAURA F. EDWARDS Duke University At the Threshold of the Plantation Household: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Southern Women’s History I REMEMBEREXACTLYWHENANDWHEREIREADELIZABETHFox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household: Women in the Old South for the first time. It was the academic year 1988-1989, and I had just left Chapel Hill, after completing my Ph.D. qualifying exams. I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, where I was trying to maintain momentum on my dissertation without access to the intellectual community of graduate school or an academic library. At a particularly difficult moment, I ordered Within the Plantation Household through a local bookstore. Having just realized the importance of women and gender to my dissertation, I had been searching for new scholarship on the topic in Southern history, regardless of time period. Fox-Genovese’s book appeared as a welcome and promising find. It was also a purchase that required a substantial waiting period and considerable thought on my part, for it came at a time when my budget did not allow for anything beyond the basics. At this time, though, I needed sustenance in an existential sense: I needed something to keep me connected to the world of history and, more importantly, to the excitement and challenge of new historical work. Within the Plantation Household did just that. Within the Plantation Household continues to reverberate through my own work and through the field of Southern women’s history more generally. At the time of its publication, Fox-Genovese broke new ground by bringing together white plantation mistresses and enslaved women in a single narrative, framed in terms of gender, race, and class. In some respects, the book reflected the general direction of the scholarship in women’s history, particularly its emphasis on the notion of gender and race as relational concepts. Yet Fox-Genovese rejected the more extreme postmodern and poststructuralist renderings that set gender, race, and class free from their materialist moorings. Remaining true to her Marxist intellectual roots, she subordinated women, race, and gender within an analytical framework rooted in the solid base of class 578 Laura F. Edwards relations.1 That approach led in two directions, one liberating and the other limiting. The way that Fox-Genovese fused new theoretical insights with venerable historiographical traditions opened up questions about women and Southern history. In particular, she was able to question—or perhaps more accurately, explode—the notion that Southern households were “private” domains separate from the “public” world of work and politics. Other scholars picked up those insights, producing a new body of historical work that completely refashioned how we think about Southern women’s lives, both inside and outside their households. Fox-Genovese, however, did not join this effort. She remained wedded to a more rigid analytical framework, one in which women remained firmly subordinated inside the social relations of the plantation household. Ironically, this same framework inspired others to expand Southern women’s history outside its traditional bounds—crossing the threshold of the household, so to speak. Within the Plantation Household appeared at a moment of particular creativity in the field of women’s history. Historians were developing a series of new questions and analytical approaches, critiquing the traditional focus on white middle-class women and organized efforts to obtain the vote. Rather than assuming a singular, unified feminine experience, they expanded the category “woman” to include working women, women of color, and lesbians, emphasizing the conflicts that characterized relations amongwomen and the variety across cultures. At the same time, some feminist historians were moving beyond the task of merely recovering information about women’s lives and positioning gender as a concept of historical analysis in its own right. By sharpening the concept of gender, they launched new analyses that focused on the dynamics of law and politics, with an eye toward addressing questions about the persistence of inequality in the past and the present. These historians built on earlier feminist scholarship that critiqued conceptual dichotomies that assumed a “natural” separation between all women and all men, and that associated women with unchanging arenas of nature, nurture, and domestic space. As these feminist scholars maintained, those conceptual categories themselves were products of history and culture...