"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe": Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History) - Hardcover

Berry, Daina Ramey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252031466 ISBN 13: 9780252031465

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2007

Synopsis

Examining how labor and economy shaped the family life of bondwomen and bondmen in the antebellum South

"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the nineteenth century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed slaves more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into slaves' internal lives through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.

A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White

About this title

About the Author

Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252031466
• ISBN 13: 9780252031465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256