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White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
"[A] fascinating survey of interracial relationships in the South between the 1680s and the 1880s. . . . Enthralling."—David Nicholson, Washington Post
This award-winning book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America’s liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.
Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves—and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.
This award-winning book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America’s liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.
Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves—and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 30, 2018
This was interesting, well researched and easy to read. Really in many ways the social anxiety that arises when black men and white women have relationships, consensual or otherwise, is in the resulting fear of softening the color line during chattel slavery and is mixed in black men and communities having political power post civil war.
The research starts with a colonial couple who were able to legally wed in about 1681. This was at just about the point that chattel slavery is being tied to black skin/African ancestry. After this romantic relationships between black men and white women become socially, though not legally, taboo. Most of the relationships tracked during this period were not consensual on the part of the black men. Chattel slaves can not consent to sex with free whites and men can be raped and black men regularly were during chattel slavery. The power differential was too great between enslaved blacks and free whites. In fact the author's research showed many of these relationships were likely non consensual on the man's part.
Mixed race relationships were not popular or socially acceptable in the black antebellum community amongst both enslaved and free blacks. This books addresses black men having relationships with white women, However the phrasing used by the author would apply to all interracial relationships.
The closest to consensual relationships documented in the book are as a result of the resulting descendants keeping and sharing the stories passed down in their respective families. These generally involve the white women helping the black men escape and often lying that she is black/mulatto in order to live in peace or marry. The descendants have stories of their grandparents love. Even in these cases though, how free are you in a relationship in which your partner has the power to free you and your descendants in perpetuity?
The biggest lesson for me is that the current narrative of black men as rapist arise post slavery. As southern white racists are desperately trying to remain in power they come up with this narrative. This narrative is inherently political and lynching and rioting by whites in this period are largely to stop blacks from voting and to steal their accumulated property. It's a transparent and brutal attempt at maintaining white supremacy. During slavery black men accused of rape were the property of white men. As such they were rarely killed. Rape by black men in the records was rare and there was little fear, as evidenced by southern white men leaving en masse for the Confederacy with no fears of rape for their unprotected mothers, wives and daughters.
I love that the author tied early white feminists, suffragists, into the promotion of this violent and racist narrative. It's important to not forget that southern white women gloried in holding black men and people down. There's also some evidence that white women enjoyed their social power over black men sexually.
And some black men and white women who gave zero fucks, even chattel slaves, and were quite defiant and open.
Miscegenation is not coined as a word until 1864. Spoiler alert: white women were having black babies since colonial times. Always been illicit sex, often instigated or outright coerced by the white women. I want to acknowledge that black men no doubt did rape white women during slavery and reconstruction, it's just hard to find legitimate cases because of the way whites complicated the issue with white supremacist lies.
The research starts with a colonial couple who were able to legally wed in about 1681. This was at just about the point that chattel slavery is being tied to black skin/African ancestry. After this romantic relationships between black men and white women become socially, though not legally, taboo. Most of the relationships tracked during this period were not consensual on the part of the black men. Chattel slaves can not consent to sex with free whites and men can be raped and black men regularly were during chattel slavery. The power differential was too great between enslaved blacks and free whites. In fact the author's research showed many of these relationships were likely non consensual on the man's part.
Mixed race relationships were not popular or socially acceptable in the black antebellum community amongst both enslaved and free blacks. This books addresses black men having relationships with white women, However the phrasing used by the author would apply to all interracial relationships.
The closest to consensual relationships documented in the book are as a result of the resulting descendants keeping and sharing the stories passed down in their respective families. These generally involve the white women helping the black men escape and often lying that she is black/mulatto in order to live in peace or marry. The descendants have stories of their grandparents love. Even in these cases though, how free are you in a relationship in which your partner has the power to free you and your descendants in perpetuity?
The biggest lesson for me is that the current narrative of black men as rapist arise post slavery. As southern white racists are desperately trying to remain in power they come up with this narrative. This narrative is inherently political and lynching and rioting by whites in this period are largely to stop blacks from voting and to steal their accumulated property. It's a transparent and brutal attempt at maintaining white supremacy. During slavery black men accused of rape were the property of white men. As such they were rarely killed. Rape by black men in the records was rare and there was little fear, as evidenced by southern white men leaving en masse for the Confederacy with no fears of rape for their unprotected mothers, wives and daughters.
I love that the author tied early white feminists, suffragists, into the promotion of this violent and racist narrative. It's important to not forget that southern white women gloried in holding black men and people down. There's also some evidence that white women enjoyed their social power over black men sexually.
And some black men and white women who gave zero fucks, even chattel slaves, and were quite defiant and open.
Miscegenation is not coined as a word until 1864. Spoiler alert: white women were having black babies since colonial times. Always been illicit sex, often instigated or outright coerced by the white women. I want to acknowledge that black men no doubt did rape white women during slavery and reconstruction, it's just hard to find legitimate cases because of the way whites complicated the issue with white supremacist lies.
August 30, 2009
Really great book that details the lives and struggles of white women and African American men who engaged in sexual relationships. She details the stories of three separate couples; beginning in the 17th century and spanning through the years after Reconstruction. I had to read this for class but found it to be incredibly interesting. The hardships and cruelty that not only African American men faced, as well as poor white women, were horrendous. Great book for those interested in the time period of 19th century and the way in which Interrational relationships were looked at among whites in America.
April 21, 2023
Book Review
"White women, Black men"
Martha Hodes
5/5 stars
"The film content of West Coast Productions has been happening in the US for about four centuries now."
*******
The book is set between 1680 and 1880, and broken into two parts: before slavery and after slavery. The idea/observation is that mixed sexual relationships became a problem *after* the Reconstruction in the South, but that they experienced varying degrees of tolerance before that time.
This only deals with certain parts of "the South." For instance: not Louisiana, because there were a lot more mulattos there who were a separate class. (Roughly analogous to today's South African Coloureds.)
This book is a little bit wordy for the bit that it has to say (and that is what I have come to expect from books that are written on University presses), but it serves a very useful purpose which is: the debunking of myths that seem VERY entrenched in the black collective unconscious in the United States.
1. Many like to imagine that the presence of European ancestry in so many black Americans is ONLY because of the slave system. (And the theme of the Innocent Black Bed Wench with the Vile White Massa has been shown on television so many times that it is something beyond hackneyed.)
That's far from the case: Race mixing happened before / during / after the slave system. Sometimes the guy was white and other times the girl was.
2. NO, not every instance of a black guy with a white girl turned into an episode of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Apparently, these things were treated in a very matter of fact way in most cases before the Reconstruction. One partner happened to be black, and the other happened to be white.
3. No, the "one drop rule" was not a thing before the Reconstruction. And it seems that what race one person was depended very much on local context. (Are we talking about inheritance rights? Or the right of a cuckolded husband to be divorced?)
4. As quiet as it is kept: a) A lot of lighter skinned black people were (and are) very happy to disassociate themselves from their darker cousins; b) Some free people of color even owned slaves; c) The majority of white Southerners did not own slaves (and it is from this lower class of whites that a lot of black men found women). NO, it is not because of the done to death speculation that house slaves were chosen because they were light skinned and treated better than darker ones.
5. There was no easy way to make all blacks slaves nor all whites slave owners during the pertinent historical time period - - although current generations have done just that. (White indentured servants and free people of color slave owners created this impossibility.) So, most of these cases deal with the determination of status for the purpose of inheriting property or supporting children of disputed paternity.
6. The KKK was not a one-trick pony. It is not only that they wanted to lynch and terrorize black people, but that they thought themselves the moral arbiter even of transactions between whites. (One Northern man who married a Southern woman had his horse disfigured. One Alabama white man was beaten for being cruel to his wife and told to "practice more proper customs in his domestic habits.")
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. As quiet as it is kept, apparently white ladies and black guys have been doing The Booty Up for many centuries. (I wonder if they were fat back then, too?) The earliest case in here is in 1681 of a married couple (Irish Nell and Negro Charles).
2. It's easy to surmise that even wwwaaayyy back then black guys were shopping on the discount rack for white ladies. The author does note (p.49) that ".... And other lowly white women also consorted with black man, both slave and free" (Lindy effect: it has been three centuries, so I guess there's no reason it couldn't go on for another three.)
Appallingly (p.50), "Mulattoes are not a rare article and the wives and daughters of slaveholders are oftener are the mothers of them than are poor women." I guess that movie Mandingo may have had some basis in reality.
3. There are just as many lustful women as there are men: for some of these cases, the women had three and four slave boyfriends at a time because one of them just could not keep up with her. In one case, one white lady was with her black boyfriend on the very morning of her wedding to a white guy and she gave birth to mulatto child nine months later. (p.127).
4. There are several actual court cases brought down where the black guy was accused of rape of a white lady--and acquitted (p.62)!
5. The average black American has between 19 and 29% European ancestry (it depends on which DNA testing service you follow), and 80% of black Americans do have at least some white ancestry. With this many interracial couplings, how can anyone be surprised that the lady was white in some fraction of them?
6. It's interesting that even (post-Reconstruction) Jim Crow/ anti-miscegenation laws did not reduce the number of black guy white girl couplings to zero. It seems like a very effective way to make somebody want to do something is to make it illegal--even in that case.
7. In spite of the amount of history that has passed, black Americans have learned little from it: people at the bottom are more likely to want to differentiate themselves from blacks than they are to see them as allies--the pronouncements of Idiot Academics be damned. (Caribbeans/Africans/Arabs/Mexicans/etc, as a rule in the United States, DO NOT like black people. Take my word for it.)
7a. The fact that these whites of that era wanted to find a way to distance themselves from blacks were white is coincidence: I live near Dearbornistan and Hamtramckistan, Michigan. Lots of Arab/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Muslims and ZERO of them with black men, so it's pretty clear that they don't want to be around black people all that much either.
8. Seems like there's always *somebody, *somewhere* interested in Black guys. Seems like white ladies have been loving in the black guys even at the risk of death.
*******
Verdict: This is a helpful and informative book, and it's probably worth it at the price of about $10. Or, the time that it takes for it to be interloaned.
Chapter synopses:
Representative cases (only a subset of all quoted within each chapter):
Chapter 2, Marriage. An Irish woman and a black man were married (in 1681) and their descendants became slaves. A few generations later they petitioned for freedom, and it is at this point that the status of the long dead Irish Nell came up. (Free or slave?)
Chapter 3, Bastardy. Polly Lane and Jim (no surname) were boyfriend and girlfriend back in 1825. Polly finds out that she is pregnant and cries rape. Jim X is eventually acquitted by a White governor after vocal support from White witnesses
Chapter 4, Adultery. Dorothea Bourne is married to a much older plantation owner, but she just cannot keep her hands off the Colored Help. She bears one or two kids but her actual husband, and another 4 (!) with some slave guy named Edmond from 1823. And even after all that, the court would not Grant her poor cuckolded husband a divorce.
Chapter 5, Color. The "one drop rule" makes for good television and a lot of nothing conversations, but the reality was nothing like that. Even by 1860, quadroons were considered "free persons of color." The case of Joseph Nunez makes us believe that what color someone was depended only on context. (If everybody in a certain city believes that this guy is white......then he for all intents and purposes is, and he will behave chemically that way.) The Franklin Hugly case was ruled in such a way as to allow a White family the polite fiction that the mother wasn't turned out by Some Black Guy. So, the mulatto child was "really" white.
Chapter 6, Wartime. Set at the tail end of the slave system. The interesting case of Tempie James, who fell in love with the slave coachmen (Squire). When her parents would not allow the marriage, she ran away and purchased him, changed his last name to "Walden," changed her identity to "mulatto" (she drank whiskey mixed with some of husbands blood so that she could truthfully swear that she had Negro blood in her, p.138) and had 15 (!) children with him.
Chapter 7, Politics. This chapter is essentially written in Early Critical Race Theoryish. (It seems like the word "patriarchy" is used on every other page.) More objective texts written before the Woke Craze (think of authors like C.Vann Woodward) have essentially noted that: after the Reconstruction political power changed over to poor sharecropping whites and the fortune of blacks changed dramatically thence. Then (and going into the 1890s) was the time during which the Jim Crow/anti-miscegenation laws were passed. Nathan Bedford Forrest (Grand Wizard).
Chapter 8, Black men, White women, and lynching. Seems that lynching only became popular after the Civil War. Rape was not even the most popular reason for lynching. (The purpose was to maintain an atmosphere of terrorism.) Ida Abercrombie and Peter Stamps.
*******
Vocabulary:
1.Left hand marriage
2. "First step by construction" (p.120, legal term)
3. amative
Ida Wells-Barnett Quotes:
1. "Dead men tell no tales, and living ones will not voluntarily do so when it means an exposure of their crimes."
2. "If Southern white men are not careful, a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women"
"White women, Black men"
Martha Hodes
5/5 stars
"The film content of West Coast Productions has been happening in the US for about four centuries now."
*******
The book is set between 1680 and 1880, and broken into two parts: before slavery and after slavery. The idea/observation is that mixed sexual relationships became a problem *after* the Reconstruction in the South, but that they experienced varying degrees of tolerance before that time.
This only deals with certain parts of "the South." For instance: not Louisiana, because there were a lot more mulattos there who were a separate class. (Roughly analogous to today's South African Coloureds.)
This book is a little bit wordy for the bit that it has to say (and that is what I have come to expect from books that are written on University presses), but it serves a very useful purpose which is: the debunking of myths that seem VERY entrenched in the black collective unconscious in the United States.
1. Many like to imagine that the presence of European ancestry in so many black Americans is ONLY because of the slave system. (And the theme of the Innocent Black Bed Wench with the Vile White Massa has been shown on television so many times that it is something beyond hackneyed.)
That's far from the case: Race mixing happened before / during / after the slave system. Sometimes the guy was white and other times the girl was.
2. NO, not every instance of a black guy with a white girl turned into an episode of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Apparently, these things were treated in a very matter of fact way in most cases before the Reconstruction. One partner happened to be black, and the other happened to be white.
3. No, the "one drop rule" was not a thing before the Reconstruction. And it seems that what race one person was depended very much on local context. (Are we talking about inheritance rights? Or the right of a cuckolded husband to be divorced?)
4. As quiet as it is kept: a) A lot of lighter skinned black people were (and are) very happy to disassociate themselves from their darker cousins; b) Some free people of color even owned slaves; c) The majority of white Southerners did not own slaves (and it is from this lower class of whites that a lot of black men found women). NO, it is not because of the done to death speculation that house slaves were chosen because they were light skinned and treated better than darker ones.
5. There was no easy way to make all blacks slaves nor all whites slave owners during the pertinent historical time period - - although current generations have done just that. (White indentured servants and free people of color slave owners created this impossibility.) So, most of these cases deal with the determination of status for the purpose of inheriting property or supporting children of disputed paternity.
6. The KKK was not a one-trick pony. It is not only that they wanted to lynch and terrorize black people, but that they thought themselves the moral arbiter even of transactions between whites. (One Northern man who married a Southern woman had his horse disfigured. One Alabama white man was beaten for being cruel to his wife and told to "practice more proper customs in his domestic habits.")
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. As quiet as it is kept, apparently white ladies and black guys have been doing The Booty Up for many centuries. (I wonder if they were fat back then, too?) The earliest case in here is in 1681 of a married couple (Irish Nell and Negro Charles).
2. It's easy to surmise that even wwwaaayyy back then black guys were shopping on the discount rack for white ladies. The author does note (p.49) that ".... And other lowly white women also consorted with black man, both slave and free" (Lindy effect: it has been three centuries, so I guess there's no reason it couldn't go on for another three.)
Appallingly (p.50), "Mulattoes are not a rare article and the wives and daughters of slaveholders are oftener are the mothers of them than are poor women." I guess that movie Mandingo may have had some basis in reality.
3. There are just as many lustful women as there are men: for some of these cases, the women had three and four slave boyfriends at a time because one of them just could not keep up with her. In one case, one white lady was with her black boyfriend on the very morning of her wedding to a white guy and she gave birth to mulatto child nine months later. (p.127).
4. There are several actual court cases brought down where the black guy was accused of rape of a white lady--and acquitted (p.62)!
5. The average black American has between 19 and 29% European ancestry (it depends on which DNA testing service you follow), and 80% of black Americans do have at least some white ancestry. With this many interracial couplings, how can anyone be surprised that the lady was white in some fraction of them?
6. It's interesting that even (post-Reconstruction) Jim Crow/ anti-miscegenation laws did not reduce the number of black guy white girl couplings to zero. It seems like a very effective way to make somebody want to do something is to make it illegal--even in that case.
7. In spite of the amount of history that has passed, black Americans have learned little from it: people at the bottom are more likely to want to differentiate themselves from blacks than they are to see them as allies--the pronouncements of Idiot Academics be damned. (Caribbeans/Africans/Arabs/Mexicans/etc, as a rule in the United States, DO NOT like black people. Take my word for it.)
7a. The fact that these whites of that era wanted to find a way to distance themselves from blacks were white is coincidence: I live near Dearbornistan and Hamtramckistan, Michigan. Lots of Arab/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Muslims and ZERO of them with black men, so it's pretty clear that they don't want to be around black people all that much either.
8. Seems like there's always *somebody, *somewhere* interested in Black guys. Seems like white ladies have been loving in the black guys even at the risk of death.
*******
Verdict: This is a helpful and informative book, and it's probably worth it at the price of about $10. Or, the time that it takes for it to be interloaned.
Chapter synopses:
Representative cases (only a subset of all quoted within each chapter):
Chapter 2, Marriage. An Irish woman and a black man were married (in 1681) and their descendants became slaves. A few generations later they petitioned for freedom, and it is at this point that the status of the long dead Irish Nell came up. (Free or slave?)
Chapter 3, Bastardy. Polly Lane and Jim (no surname) were boyfriend and girlfriend back in 1825. Polly finds out that she is pregnant and cries rape. Jim X is eventually acquitted by a White governor after vocal support from White witnesses
Chapter 4, Adultery. Dorothea Bourne is married to a much older plantation owner, but she just cannot keep her hands off the Colored Help. She bears one or two kids but her actual husband, and another 4 (!) with some slave guy named Edmond from 1823. And even after all that, the court would not Grant her poor cuckolded husband a divorce.
Chapter 5, Color. The "one drop rule" makes for good television and a lot of nothing conversations, but the reality was nothing like that. Even by 1860, quadroons were considered "free persons of color." The case of Joseph Nunez makes us believe that what color someone was depended only on context. (If everybody in a certain city believes that this guy is white......then he for all intents and purposes is, and he will behave chemically that way.) The Franklin Hugly case was ruled in such a way as to allow a White family the polite fiction that the mother wasn't turned out by Some Black Guy. So, the mulatto child was "really" white.
Chapter 6, Wartime. Set at the tail end of the slave system. The interesting case of Tempie James, who fell in love with the slave coachmen (Squire). When her parents would not allow the marriage, she ran away and purchased him, changed his last name to "Walden," changed her identity to "mulatto" (she drank whiskey mixed with some of husbands blood so that she could truthfully swear that she had Negro blood in her, p.138) and had 15 (!) children with him.
Chapter 7, Politics. This chapter is essentially written in Early Critical Race Theoryish. (It seems like the word "patriarchy" is used on every other page.) More objective texts written before the Woke Craze (think of authors like C.Vann Woodward) have essentially noted that: after the Reconstruction political power changed over to poor sharecropping whites and the fortune of blacks changed dramatically thence. Then (and going into the 1890s) was the time during which the Jim Crow/anti-miscegenation laws were passed. Nathan Bedford Forrest (Grand Wizard).
Chapter 8, Black men, White women, and lynching. Seems that lynching only became popular after the Civil War. Rape was not even the most popular reason for lynching. (The purpose was to maintain an atmosphere of terrorism.) Ida Abercrombie and Peter Stamps.
*******
Vocabulary:
1.Left hand marriage
2. "First step by construction" (p.120, legal term)
3. amative
Ida Wells-Barnett Quotes:
1. "Dead men tell no tales, and living ones will not voluntarily do so when it means an exposure of their crimes."
2. "If Southern white men are not careful, a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women"
October 3, 2022
This book has good historical sources, but some of the conclusions by the author seem a bit odd. And there is a lot of talk of white women forcing black men to have sexual relations with them but no mention throughout the book of black men and white women actually being in love, a conclusion that is left out even after evidence having been given of white women and black men in the South running away together. She also seems to presume that black never raped white women, again, even when citing evidence that that did most likely happen.
This author clearly had an agenda (white women are bad), and it was a bit annoying. The sentiment behind this book goes along well with that other rather terrible book To Kill a Mockingbird, which Northerners eat up on the daily.
Last, the author seems to be unaware that black men and white women getting together, throughout American history, was and is one way for both of these groups to stick it to white male patriarchy, who basically owned both of them, albeit in different ways.
This author clearly had an agenda (white women are bad), and it was a bit annoying. The sentiment behind this book goes along well with that other rather terrible book To Kill a Mockingbird, which Northerners eat up on the daily.
Last, the author seems to be unaware that black men and white women getting together, throughout American history, was and is one way for both of these groups to stick it to white male patriarchy, who basically owned both of them, albeit in different ways.
March 15, 2019
So depressing... This is a serious effort to parse the suffering of slavery and its aftermath in America, focusing on relationships between men and women. This book dashes many of the stereotypes I previously held (the misogyny was even more horrific than the racism, if you can believe it), but you come away with a passionate mistrust of the human soul. Scary shit.
March 29, 2007
Really interesting historical unearthing of a little known facet of slave society. Not at all dry, imminently readable.
February 5, 2022
This is one of those books that casts a terrible light on academia by proving that some lines of academia exist only for the benefit of the academic who somehow managed to find a means of leveraging funding to pay themselves while performing this study and then attempted to further capitalize on that by writing a book.
This book is a horrible assault on the time and sensibilities on anyone looking for meaningful information and insight into the conditions of slavery class and culture in the Antebellum south
The author clearly went to great lengths to research a topic on which there is little factual information, and the little that exists, is clearly tainted by cultural bias, based on racism and class.
The author sites a handful of cases on which the record is one sided, typically in favour of the white side of the issue which results in her having to guess at possibilities and motivations of the aggrieved black side.
Any of us could have done this and been just as accurate
The book does hint at a couple of interesting extrapolations and conclusions however these along with any meaningful information in the book could have been expressed in a quarter of the length of the volume which is highly repetitive and verbose.
That being said as the book draws to its conclusions and the author gets into reformation, the activities of the Klan and the perspectives and behaviours of the southern white demographic, the book does actually become a little more bearable and flirts with being interesting, but not enough so to make up for what the reader must suffer through to get to this point
In the typical manner of academics who have very little of substance, the author went to great lengths to find ways to stretch out what could have been more appropriately presented without the tedious and odious regurgitation of a handful of records and references she was actually able to obtain
If you decide to read this book read the first two chapters, the last two and stay away from the notes and citations at the end which make up almost a third of this work. Seriously they do!!!!
This book is a horrible assault on the time and sensibilities on anyone looking for meaningful information and insight into the conditions of slavery class and culture in the Antebellum south
The author clearly went to great lengths to research a topic on which there is little factual information, and the little that exists, is clearly tainted by cultural bias, based on racism and class.
The author sites a handful of cases on which the record is one sided, typically in favour of the white side of the issue which results in her having to guess at possibilities and motivations of the aggrieved black side.
Any of us could have done this and been just as accurate
The book does hint at a couple of interesting extrapolations and conclusions however these along with any meaningful information in the book could have been expressed in a quarter of the length of the volume which is highly repetitive and verbose.
That being said as the book draws to its conclusions and the author gets into reformation, the activities of the Klan and the perspectives and behaviours of the southern white demographic, the book does actually become a little more bearable and flirts with being interesting, but not enough so to make up for what the reader must suffer through to get to this point
In the typical manner of academics who have very little of substance, the author went to great lengths to find ways to stretch out what could have been more appropriately presented without the tedious and odious regurgitation of a handful of records and references she was actually able to obtain
If you decide to read this book read the first two chapters, the last two and stay away from the notes and citations at the end which make up almost a third of this work. Seriously they do!!!!
April 28, 2021
A topic barely admitted let alone delved into, but Martha Hodes takes the plunge and reveals some very telling yet unspoken history of white women and black men in the Antebellum South. Out of instances found and sighted in this book, the white women involved were mostly from the poorer class of whites, although not an issue exclusive to this class. It is thought that the only reason more instances were not found involving the richer planter/plantation families is that they handle these situations very quietly among themselves. Using found credible sources of court documentation, new articles, letters and some family accounts. Though quietly tolerated prior to the Civil War things take a sudden and deadly turn after.
Post-Civil War deadly change to these sexual liaisons became politically charged adding a particularly deadly element. What was once tolerated before the way is now labeled rape and color lines were now being deepen. Hodes sights some very chilling and horrific incidents of mob rule towards black men involved with white women. Hodes give insight into how these instances of these interracial sexual liaisons had become a threat to the fabric of the Southern White cultural psyche of supremacy. These sexual liaisons now where growing in number and violence, not only towards back men but the white women involved also.
This book is a great read for those who like the unique areas of American History.
Post-Civil War deadly change to these sexual liaisons became politically charged adding a particularly deadly element. What was once tolerated before the way is now labeled rape and color lines were now being deepen. Hodes sights some very chilling and horrific incidents of mob rule towards black men involved with white women. Hodes give insight into how these instances of these interracial sexual liaisons had become a threat to the fabric of the Southern White cultural psyche of supremacy. These sexual liaisons now where growing in number and violence, not only towards back men but the white women involved also.
This book is a great read for those who like the unique areas of American History.
February 17, 2011
This book chronicles the changing state in relationships between white women and black men. While society always disapproved of these relationships in the South, violent reactions to them were uncommon until the post-Civil War era, mostly due to the fact that the majority of black men in the relationships were slaves and thus considered property. Violent reprisals against black men were used to maintain the antebellum power structure in the South after the Civil War. Hodes combines insightful research with engaging stories about interracial relationships.
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December 23, 2016* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes | This book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. #slavery #relationships #history
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes | This book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. #slavery #relationships #history
September 23, 2015
An excellent look at the history of interracial relationships beginning in the early days of European settlement of the US> Hodes navigates a sensitive subject with grace while maintaining the integrity of the stories she tells. I recommend it to anyone interested in women/racial history in the US.
July 30, 2013
Very very insightful book. It got better as the book went along. Getting the information for this book must have been tough. I enjoyed this book.
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