Product Description: Caroline Petigru Carson (1820-1892), the elder daughter of Charleston intellectual James Louis Petigru and sister of the novelist Susan Petigru King, seemed destined from birth for life as a southern plantation mistress. Yet, like her sister, Carson challenged the conventions of nineteenth-century Charleston and defied traditional expectations by living apart from her husband and later as a very merry widow...read more

Product Description: In the three decades before the Civil War, James Louis Petigru became the dean of the South Carolina bar and Charleston's leading exponent of the constitutional conservatism that placed federal union above state rights, the economic views that underlay Whig politics, and the liberal vision of individual rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The often-stereotyped belles and matrons of the nineteenth-century South emerge as diverse personalities in this compelling account of three generations of women from a South Carolina family whose fate rose and fell with the fortunes of the state. Through vivid, interwoven life stories, the book offers a unique perspective on how these women conducted their lives, shared personal triumphs and defeats, endured the deprivations and despair of civil war, and experienced a social revolution.A Family of Women focuses on the female descendants of Louise Gibert Pettigrew (later changed to Petigru), who rose from upcountry obscurity to privileged prominence in Charleston and on low country plantations, where they variously flourished as belles, managed large households, shocked society with their unconventionality, educated their children, endured troubled marriages, and maintained close family ties. Using the letters, diaries, novels, and memoirs of the Petigru women and the material culture surrounding them, the authors weave a complex story of women well worth knowing.

Product Description: Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities: slave and free, rich and poor, married and single, those who worked mostly at home and those who led more public lives...read more

Studies the lives and work of ten leaders to illuminate the similarities and differences between abolitionists