3 historiography of slavery. 114 Major works by John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese and others recognized the value of studying slaves in their own right, rather than simply as objects of white treatment. Yet most of these studies ignored the lives of women, black and white.

The exception was The Southern Lady, in which Anne Firor Scott first documented the objections of Southern women to slavery. In a subsequent article, she also highlighted their lack of control over their own fertility on the one hand and their resentment of the sexual freedom of their husbands on the other. In addition, she argued, they felt ill-equipped to change the patriarchal system that ruled their lives.'

In the 1980s, several studies confirmed Scott's basic findings. C. Vann

Woodward argued that Mary Boykin Chesnut had antislavery sentiment. In The

Plantation Mistress, Catherine Clinton found additional evidence that women objected to slavery for moral and/or practical reasons. She contended that many slaveholding women expressed objections to slavery that had more to do with the realities of everyday life than with ideological speculation. Specifically, they felt that slavery burdened them with extra work; some women, in fact, thought of themselves as the "slave of slaves.:"

"Peter Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 9; John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), and Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).

5Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970),48-52, and "Women's Perspective on the Patriarchy in the 1850s." Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 52-64.

6C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), and Clinton, The Plantation Mistress, 16-35.