The Ideal Woman in the Antebellum South: Lady or Farmwife?

Abstract

H ISTORIANS OF THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH HAVE DEPICTED THE southern woman largely in terms of the lady. Works dealing with the plantation tradition, nineteenth-century romanticism, and antebellum literature have placed a natural emphasis on the lady. Furthermore, there can be no doubt that the ideal of the southern lady exerted a strong emotional appeal to the minds of many people in both the antebellum and the postbellum South.' To date, however, historians have failed to note that an impor