Jane H. Pease – författare

The often-stereotyped belles and matrons of the nineteenth-century South emerge as diverse personalities in this compelling account of three generations of women from a South Carolina family whose fate rose and fell with the fortunes of the state. Through vivid, interwoven life stories, the book offers a unique perspective on how these women conducted their lives, shared personal triumphs and defeats, endured the deprivations and despair of civil war, and experienced a social revolution.A Family of Women focuses on the female descendants of Louise Gibert Pettigrew (later changed to Petigru), who rose from upcountry obscurity to privileged prominence in Charleston and on low country plantations, where they variously flourished as belles, managed large households, shocked society with their unconventionality, educated their children, endured troubled marriages, and maintained close family ties. Using the letters, diaries, novels, and memoirs of the Petigru women and the material culture surrounding them, the authors weave a complex story of women well worth knowing.

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities: slave and free, rich and poor, married and single, those who worked mostly at home and those who led more public lives. Jane Pease and William Pease argue that legal, political, economic, and cultural contraints did limit the options available to women. Nevertheless, women had opportunities to make meaningful choices about their lives and sometimes to achieve considerable autonomy.By comparing the women of Charleston and Boston, the authors explore how both urbanization and regional differences — especially with regard to slavery — governed all women’s lives. They assess the impact of marriage and work on women’s religious, philanthropic, and reform activity and examine the female uses of education and property in order to illuminate the considerable variation in women’s lives. Finally, they consider women’s choices of life-style, ranging from compliance with to defiance of increasingly rigid social precepts defining appropriate female behavior.However bound women were by society’s prescriptions describing their role or by the class structure of their society, they chose their ways of life from among such options as spinsterhood or marriage, domesticity or paid work, charitable activity or the social whirl, the solace of religion or the escape of drink. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, court documents, and contemporary literature, Ladies, Women, and Wenches explores how the women of Charleston and Boston made the choices in their lives between total dependence and full autonomy.

A biography of one of South Carolina's leading antebellum lawyers and major political thinkers; In the three decades before the Civil War, James Louis Petigru became the dean of the South Carolina bar and Charleston's leading exponent of the constitutional conservatism that placed federal union above state rights, the economic views that underlay Whig politics, and the liberal vision of individual rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. In the only modern biography of Petigru, William H, and Jane H. Pease trace the rise to social and professional preeminence that not only placed him among South Carolina's elite but also gave him national visibility. In doing so, they explore the workings of the extended family he headed, the politics of the state he loved, and the intricacies of the legal system he mastered. Central to Petigru's life was the ambiguity into which his competing loyalties plunged him. Loyal to his native state, he was a vocal opponent of its political values. Despire his dissent on the critical issues of nullification and secession, Petigru was elected attorney general, served as a state representative, and codified the state's laws. Born in South Carolina's upcountry to a family of Scots-Irish and Huguenot ancestry, Petrigru achieved such high distinction as an attorney and politician that both Confederates and Yankees eulogized him when he died in Charleston in 1863. Throughout his career, his espousal of private property, individual liberty, the rule of law, and the United States Constitution remained unflinching and gave Petigru the wisdom and assurance to be the state's most notable dissenter.

The often-stereotyped belles and matrons of the nineteenth-century South emerge as diverse personalities in this compelling account of three generations of women from a South Carolina family whose fate rose and fell with the fortunes of the state. Through vivid, interwoven life stories, the book offers a unique perspective on how these women conducted their lives, shared personal triumphs and defeats, endured the deprivations and despair of civil war, and experienced a social revolution.A Family of Women focuses on the female descendants of Louise Gibert Pettigrew (later changed to Petigru), who rose from upcountry obscurity to privileged prominence in Charleston and on low country plantations, where they variously flourished as belles, managed large households, shocked society with their unconventionality, educated their children, endured troubled marriages, and maintained close family ties. Using the letters, diaries, novels, and memoirs of the Petigru women and the material culture surrounding them, the authors weave a complex story of women well worth knowing.