Out of the House of Bondage

Thavolia Glymph. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Glymph argues that the myth of Southern womanhood—the ideal of the gentle, loving, kind-hearted lady of plantation myth—bore little relation to the reality. White mistresses were stern, often brutal, taskmasters who directed the work of black female domestic servants in plantation households. The idealized portrait was a product of the mythologized, idealized Old South; it’s purpose was both to legitimize paternalism, and to mask the reality of the plantation household as a place of work, a public as well as private space.

The bulk of her primary sources are slave narratives and memoirs, as well as letters and diaries by white mistresses. Glymph reads both with a critical and discerning eye, knowing that slave narratives were often recorded under some degree of duress; and the diaries and recollections of mistresses often betrayed an inability to regard slave women as fully human, as women with their own independent needs and desires.

Glymph acknowledges her debt to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who identified the role that paternalism played in creating the myth of the generous, empathetic mistress who cared for her slaves as part of the household. However, Glymph feels that most historians have accepted the idea that mistresses were essentially passive figures who suffered as women, rather than ruled as white women.

Given that this study concerns a world of women, contained within the household which was ideologically considered a place of domesticity and refuge from the public sphere (even though it was a place of coercive labor), it would be interesting to compare it to the works of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm she references in the Introduction. The parallels she briefly notes between her world of determinedly resistant domestic servants, and Hobsbawm’s Revolutionaries, for example, suggest a very different conceptual frame for the book which follows.

The transformation she describes ends in a relatively limited time frame; it would be interesting to tie this study to a more focused examination of relations between white female employers and black female domestic servants in the 20th century. The linkage is briefly considered in the Epilogue, but for the most part this study ends at the dawn of Jim Crow.