Thoughtful white men and women like Sarah Grimke and Mary Chestnut could not help but see the injustice of slavery--not to mention its deleterious effects on white families. Slavery corrupts the slaveholder as profoundly as it corrupts the slave. In fact, one of the most interesting threads of these readings is the ways in which the official model of womanhood--"The True Woman" --is challenged and undermined by slavery, even as it remained a source of power for many women.

For example, for white women like Chesnut and Evans, the ideal was essentially domestic: a woman was to ground her selfhood in the family, maintain its integrity by her personal chastity, and serve its members through her selfless piety, loyalty and labor. One of the reasons for the extraordinary popularity of Evans' novels (and many others like them) was the endorsement of that ideal.  Even when Evans' characters display a sprightly independence as young women, as soon as they are married they promptly submit themselves to their husbands. (Evans' post-war novels were decidedly anti-feminist, demonstrating, as she wrote, "that the borders of the feminine realm could not be enlarged, without rendering the throne unsteady, and subverting God's law of order"(qtd. in McCandless, 154)¹.)  But slavery, with its sexual exploitation of black women, made the purity of family bonds and the sacredness of marriage in many southern households a sham at best. At the same time, the powerlessness of slaves was a painful mirror for some white women of their own limited control of their lives. For both reasons, many southern white women were "abolitionists" at heart, despite their notorious support of the southern cause.

For black women that same domestic ideal offered different challenges--and opportunities. As slaves, black women were defined by their sexuality and sexual services: pleasure for their white masters and production of chattel children. [The fact that the legal status of the child depended on the status of the mother insured that the children of slaves would not be free, irrespective of their white father's status.] While the situation of black women unmasked the reality of the role of all women in a patriarchal society (to please and serve men), they were themselves unable to achieve the status of proper women, of ladies: that is, asexual and pure, devoted to their own families or even able to sustain the bonds of motherhood or marriage. Thus for women like Linda Brent, preserving her chastity from her salacious master, Mr. Flint, and choosing her own husband, offered a radical challenge to the whole institution of slavery: black women were not believed to be capable of, much less to desire, "true womanhood." But Linda Brent shows us that she, too, is a true woman.

Ironically, then, black women like Jacobs or Keckley sought the status of the domestic role and the privilege of the pedestal at the very moment when some white women, like Grimke or Chestnut, were beginning to notice that that same pedestal looked very much like the place of a slave. Reflecting on such ironies seem to me one of the most interesting dimensions of this early work by southern women writers.

McCandless, Amy Thompson. "August Jane Evans Wilson." History of Southern Women's Literature. Eds. Carolyn Perry and Mary L. Weaks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 2002. 150-55.