Agency Under Fire : Out of the House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph (2008)

Most appropriate for Women's History Month, this week's reading for my graduate history seminar takes a rare perspective of women's labor history in the American South. The violence of slavery is usually envisioned at the hands of men, outdoors; say, an overseer whipping a field hand. But this text examines the hegemony among women inside the plantation household, a space both public and private, intimate and impersonal, before and after Emancipation.

In Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, Thavolia Glymph uses the dichotomies of the plantation household as the environment most likely to have housed interactions between enslaved women and their mistresses. Domination and abuse of enslaved women would have largely occurred in the plantation household, which in itself represented "a field of power relations and political practices" between and within races and genders (2). The creation and use of the plantation household is quite useful in that before Emancipation, white women were the de facto managers of the home, during the Civil War they were witness to a major transfiguration of the home, and after Emancipation they were the unwilling participants to a historic shift in women's work in the home. White women were at all once owners and then employers. Black women were surviving silently and then living loud and vocal, propelling both races of women out of the plantation household into a (more) free society.

"Free labor" in this book is similar to how I interpreted it while reading Coolies and Cane a few weeks ago.  After Emancipation, living as a black woman in a free wage society largely meant obtaining the right to move freely in the world at-large and the world of work. She slowly obtained the option to choose the right to work, and with that, the right to be fired. As the threat and reality of perpetual corporal punishment at the hands of owners faded into the past, she began to use her voice, one that had silently accompanied generations of active resistance to slavery. With Emancipation she had obtained the voice to quit, and in at least one case documented in the text, the right to take legal action for wrongs committed by an employer (191). Her newly acquired job mobility in domestic service widened her sphere of influence to other homes transfigured by the Civil War. She and her sisters in the South could hire out their skills as washerwomen, cooks, and seamstresses, among a variety of other vocations that had previously made up the plantation-era division of labor they had been forced into. Another use of black women's voices and choices were the increased information networks - gossiping - that provided a means of avoiding violent or unfair homes. Using her voice to leave unsafe work sites and convey intimate details about behaviors and employment practices radically changed how white women interacted with their environments and their employ, while allowing black women another channel through which to express distrust, anger, hurt and frustration with racism.

Glymph's plantation household can first be considered a private residence, as we think of our homes today; intimate and personal. In the proslavery ideologies of the time, slaves were part of the "family" and thus a part of the private nature of the household. Glymph does not shy away from the hygienic and very often, sexual demands white owners made their slaves meet for their personal comforts. But in practice, a slave was an economic resource used to provide goods and services that were desired by owners, usually, a biological, white family. The ownership of a slave meant there existed a public component to the plantation household that governed the rights of owners over their property. It was this explicitly public ownership that black women resisted, first with their actions and later with both their actions and voices. Glymph admits that the "historiography of American slavery tends to be squeamish about the inherent violence of the arrangements slavery required (57)." Black women of the time could not afford to be squeamish about the violence they faced, and quite often opposed the abusive and violent tactics of their mistresses.

Earlier in the term, we read a paper by Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor of African/African-American history, entitled "On Agency" (2003). In it, Johnson asserts that agency is more than simply human volition or will. If it can be reduced to such, then it voids the personal efforts of the slave to actively engage in and defy her oppressive state while in the midst of it. Slaveholder expectations of black women reduced their agency to "acting out" rather than being a deliberate response to systematic racism. "Rendered childlike and irresponsible, slave women could also not be serious contenders for the status of rebels (94)." Such gendered notions on warfare held by white men and women alike meant they frequently misinterpreted incidents of rebelliousness. Glymph writes further on that page that whites depended on a "prevailing pattern of who would be charged with concerted rebelliousness," and black women, by and large, were not suspect. This evidence of early racial profiling prevented white planter class Southerners from anticipating the new levels of interaction in the plantation household with black women after the War.

Decorum and custom demanded that white women respond to the voice of black women. The image and respect of the Southern mistress stemmed from an (ironically) patronizing submissiveness to the ingrained patriarchy that characterized the home during the 19th-century. Glymph describes the "good" mistress paradigm as the white woman who has "dedicated her life to the never-ending task of managing her household and caring for her family and slaves in sickness and in health. Her comeliness was due in no small measure to her ability to satisfy all who depended on her, to manage a household rent by inequalities of race and gender with seeming equanimity (19)." The prototypical Southern Lady was expected to be fragile and protected by her man, the master of his domain and slaves. This typical view of Southern women deserves Glymph's perspective. Her book is not only about black women, but white women and the patriarchal weight they were subjected to along with the slaves, especially those who were female. By joining their struggles as women then pitting them against the other as blacks gained their voice in labor negotiations, Glymph gives a 360-degree view of power relations among women during this time. Both the lens of race and that of gender are necessary to complete this picture. Glymph tends to leave the details on the patriarchy to the reader, however, choosing to elaborate on how women of different races found their work lives forever changed. This is a benefit as there is considerably less scholarship on women exercising agency during the 19th-century, so the book finds fertile ground in the audience of women's history and American history readers.

This book is unique in its presentation of the economic principle-agent problems of women in the Emancipation era. In another twist of irony, seeing as how I am a single, educated, Southern economist, "economy' was a virtue of Southern women even then, save that in the past, it exemplified a woman who ran her plantation household with the utmost domestic efficiency, meting out directives and punishments as needed to suit her desires. As a black woman, I am far from that manifestation of economy in any era. However, it begs the question of the agency of those "women of economy" who came before me. Was it their choice as white women to be executives of the Reconstructive homestead, especially as legions of newly freed black women actively chose to pursue an education at newly founded institutions such as Spelman College (my alma mater), and the demands of satisfactions of their own private family life? As black women exercised their voice and choice for work, white women had no choice but to find and preserve some agency of their own to maintain their image of the genteel, mannered, micro-managing matriarch. This meant negotiating with former slaves, finding new solutions to run the household smoothly, and in many cases, going into the work force themselves to find their own voice. Glymph's story is not a story about white women or black women, but a story about women who work, worked together, and worked towards a new future.


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