| The Big House after Slavery examines the economic, social, andpolitical challenges that Virginia planter families faced following Confederate defeat andemancipation. Amy Feely Morsman addresses how men and women of the planter class responded topostwar problems and how their adaptations to life without slavery altered their maritalrelationships and their conceptions of gender roles. Unable to afford many servants in thenew free labor economy, many of Virginia's former masters put themselves to work on theirplantations, and their wives had to expand their responsibilities as well, taking on the tasks ofcooking and cleaning in addition to working in the garden, the henhouse, and the dairy. Laboring inthese ways and struggling to maintain their standing as elites contributed to an identity crisisamong Virginia planters. It also led them to practice mutuality within their own marriages and toreconsider what proper Southern womanhood and manhood meant in the new postwar order. Usingnewspapers, periodicals, organization records, and numerous letters from Virginia plantationfamilies, Morsman captures how these frustrated elites made sense of embarrassing postwar changes,in the private but also in the public spheres they inhabited. Morsman suggests that theplanters' adaptations may have been carried forward by their adult children away from thecrumbling plantations and into the urban households of the New South. |
