A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier

by Joan E. Cashin

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1992-1993 In A Family Venture , Joan Cashin explores the profoundly different ways that planter men and women experienced migration from the Southern seaboard to the antebellum Southern frontier. Migration was a family venture in the sense that both men and women took part. But they went to the frontier with competing many men tried to escape the intricate kinship networks of the seaboard, while women worked to preserve them if they could. Drawing on extensive archival sources and using the perspectives of several disciplines, Cashin explores the effects of the migration experience on sex roles, the nature of slavery, race relations, and a variety of other issues.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Jennifer Payne Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

After many books about migration to the post-Civil War American West, finally a book about an earlier trek through the wilderness to the Old Southwest. These families pushed the cotton frontier through to Texas and were responsible for the spread of slavery and sectionalism. Cashin's treatment of the subject focuses on the individuals, particularly the wives and children who were often less-enthusiastic and even unwilling participants in this move. They left comfort, relatives, and civilization behind to face lonliness, poverty, hunger, and disease. There used to be a saying about Texas that it was paradise for men and horses but hell for women and oxen. The Southern frontier of the 1820s-40s was that and more. Read this well-written work to learn more.