What do you think of when asked about the antebellum southern colonies? Most would call to mind the practice of slavery or perhaps the abundance of cash crops raised on large plantations. What people have overlooked for many generations are the women of this society. The antebellum south provided few opportunities for women of either black or white descent. They were expected to be submissive home bodies and, depending on race and social status, anything from a field worker to helping manage the daily running of a plantation. If you were a white women it is likely you lived a isolated existence due to the rural ways of the antebellum south. If you were a slave women life was better in ways, but your stability and personal safety was always in question due to the nature of slavery. In either situation, southern women lived a hard life that wasn't often known about or completely understood. The life of southern women is chronicled by Sally G. McMillen in her book Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. The following is brief review of the this book.

In the life of southern women, the most important thing for you to do was to marry and maintain a family. For elite

Once a women was married, her main focus became that of bearing and raising children. The majority of women in the antebellum south began having children in their late teens and continued on through menopause or their death. It was common for a women of the time to be pregnant seven times or more. Within the confines of the south, women became pregnant more often because large families were needed to help the progression of the farm or plantation. Pregnancy was for the most part a time of high stress and illness for most southern women. Upon pregnancy most women continued on with there daily routine because her family really couldn't survive without her. Slave women bore slightly more children than white women of the time but they also had to deal with the fact that they might be sold of at any time. Slave women also had to deal with a higher rate of miscarriages due to the working conditions and demands of slave life in general. Slaves were encouraged to reproduce because this was a continual source of new property for the slave owner. Child birth among slaves was often rewarded with new clothing or a small amount of cash. Raising the children was also strictly up to the women. On farms and plantations, white women often left the infants under the watch of older children while she continued to run the house on a daily basis. A infant was constantly worried over by both black and white mothers until an adequate age due to the great number of health risks in those days. The main difference in this was that white babies often received better medical care than that of a slave child.

Another facet of an antebellum women was her education and religion. Education was reserved for free white and black women. The end of the American Revolution brought about a change that encouraged women's education. This education, not nearly as strenuous as that received by males, was mainly seen as a way to make the women better mothers and to increase there feminine character. Religion was a strong institution that both white and black women shared in. The spread of many evangelical denominations is mostly credited to Christian women.

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Approximate Word count = 1451
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)