Jane Turner Censer – författare

Many historians of late have portrayed upper-class southerners of the antebellum period as inordinately aristocratic and autocratic. Some have even seen in the planters' family relations the faint yet distinct shadow of a master's dealings with his slaves.Challenging such commonly held assumptions about the attitudes and actions of the pre-Civil War southern elite, Jane Turner Censer draws on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including letters, diaries, and other first-person accounts as well as federal census materials and local wills, deeds, and marriage records, to show that southern planters, at least in their relations with their children, were caring, affectionate, and surprisingly egalitarian. Through the close study of more than one hundred North Carolina families, she reveals the adults to have been doting parents who emphasised to their children the importance of education and achievement and the wise use of time and money.The planters guided their offspring toward autonomy by progressively granting them more and more opportunities for decision making. By the time sons and daughters were faced with choosing a marriage partner, parents played only a restrained advisory role. Similarly, fathers left career decisions almost entirely up to their sons. Censer concludes that children almost invariably met their parents' high expectations. Most of them chose to marry within their class, and the second generation usually maintained or improved their parents' high economic status.On the other hand, Censer finds that planters rarely developed warm, empathetic relationships with their slaves. Even the traditional ""mammy,"" whose role is southern planter families was been exalted in much of our literature, seems to have held a relatively minor place in the family structure. Bringing to light a wealth of previously unassimilated information, North Carolina Planters and Their Children points toward a new understanding of social and cultural life among the wealthy in the early nineteenth-century South.

This impressively researched book tells the important but little-known story of elite southern white women's successful quest for a measure of self-reliance and independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow. Profusely illustrated with the experiences of fascinating women in Virginia and North Carolina, it presents a compelling new chapter in the history of American women and of the South.As were many ideas, notions of the ideal woman were in flux after the Civil War. While poverty added a harder edge to the search for a good marriage among some ""southern belles,"" other privileged white women forged identities that challenged the belle model altogether. Their private and public writings from the 1870s and 1880s suggest a widespread ethic of autonomy. Sometimes that meant increased domestic skills born of the new reality of fewer servants. But women also owned and transmitted property, worked for pay, and even pursued long-term careers. Many found a voice in a plethora of new voluntary organizations, and some southern women attained national celebrity in the literary world, creating strong and capable heroines and mirroring an evolving view toward northern society.Yet even as elite southern women experimented with their roles, external forces and contradictions within their position were making their unprecedented attitudes and achievements socially untenable. During the 1890s, however, virulent racism and pressures to re-create a mythic South left these women caught between the revived image of the southern belle and the emerging emancipated woman. Just as the memoirs of southern white women have been key to understanding life during the Civil War, the writings of such women unlock the years of dramatic change that followed. Informed by myriad primary documents, Jane Turner Censer immerses us in the world of postwar southern women as they rethought and rebuilt themselves, their families, and their region during a brief but important period of relative freedom.