Dissertation Information for Mary Cathryn Cain NAME: - Mary Cathryn Cain
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2001)
ADVISORS: - Jonathan Prude
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Mary E. Odem
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: The whiteness of white women: Gender and the use of race privilege in the urban Northeast, 1820--1870
Abstract: This dissertation explores the construction of race and gender identity among Northern, urban, middle-class, white American women between 1820 and 1870. These years were crucial in the white female experience as the ideologies of republicanism and separate spheres combined to define the ideal white woman as submissive, dependent and beholden to a male master--traits that were simultaneously recognized by the culture as slave-like and distinctly non-white. The dissertation probes this paradox and argues that white women responded by constructing a white female identity that not only precluded any semblance of slavery, but affirmed their womanliness.
The private world of the household and public arena of reform work were the two primary loci of antebellum white women's racial identity construction. This dissertation draws heavily on material from both--including the writings of reformers, domestic theorists, novelists, and household mistresses. Chapter One articulates the identity problems faced by middle-class white women in the antebellum period and posits whiteness as the route to a more empowered political identity for this constituency. Chapter Two contemplates whiteness as a physical marker of virtue and as a moral identity that was recognized by middle-class white women in the personal traits of cleanliness, economy, usefulness and gender distinctiveness. Individual chapters are then devoted to each of the three primary contexts in which antebellum white women deployed their racial identities: household management, moral reform and anti slavery. Together, these chapters confirm that white women's construction of whiteness was, in fact, less an attempt to challenge prevailing antebellum class and gender prescriptions than to reformulate them in more politically palatable terms. The study concludes with a discussion of the Fifteenth Amendment, demonstrating that its passage forced white women to re-evaluate their understanding of female roles in the republic and propelled them, eventually, into a raced and gendered struggle for more explicit political recognition.
By examining the formation and implementation of white women's racial identity in these critical contexts, the dissertation depicts female whiteness as an invaluable cultural commodity in the slave republic, as a gender-determined experience, and as an identity inseparable from white women's sense of womanhood.
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calculated 2008-02-02 22:41:15
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