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

Berry, Daina Ramey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025207758X ISBN 13: 9780252077586

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2010

Synopsis

"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowcountry 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 workforces 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

About this title

Review:

"Swing the Sickle demonstrates how far gender has come as a category of historical analysis in slave studies. It displays refinement, nuance, and balance . . . it brings together gender, work, family, and economy in an easily accessible, readable account useful to slave scholars and students of Georgia slavery in particular."--Georgia Historical Quarterly

"Reconstructing the practices of slavery from plantation records, memoirs, and newspapers and the encounter with those practices through folk songs and ex-slave testimonies, Berry succeeds in capturing commonalities and differences in slavery in white-majority communities and African American-majority communities. . . . [An] important contribution to historiography. Recommended."--Choice

From the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 025207758X
• ISBN 13: 9780252077586
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256