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Incorporates 125 documents that explore the lives of women in their own words. Cashin has selected excerpts from letters, diaries, wills, recipe books and advice literature and drawn from sources in every Southern state. Her subjects include the wives of planters, merchants, professionals, artisans and yeoman farmers. Organized into six topical chapters - family life, friendship, work, race relations and the secession crisis - these writings illuminate the experience of white Southern women. In an introductory essay that reviews the historiography since the 1960s, Cashin argues that white women in the slave South created their own distintive culture, a "culture of resignation" that, unlike their Northern counterparts, accepted inequity and refrained from political activity. This volume examines the strong ties women developed among female kinfolk and friends; their troubled relations with slaves, especially female slaves; their frequent distaste for politics; and their mixed but largely fearful reaction to secession. The documents emphasize the pressing daily responsibilities these women faced and reveal their authors as flawed, complex, and wholly different from the stereotypes of Southern women that persist in the popular imagination.