Susanna Delfino – författare

Although historians over the past two decades have written extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they have largely neglected the world of the working woman. Neither Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labors of ordinary southern women--white, free black, and Indian.Contributors to this volume illuminate women''s involvement in the southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays explore the working lives of a wide range of women--nuns and prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic servants--in urban and rural settings across the antebellum South. By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially acknowledged and "invisible" work within the context of cultural attitudes regarding women''s proper place in society, the book sheds new light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race, class, and gender in the modernizing South.The contributors are E. Susan Barber, Bess Beatty, Emily Bingham, James Taylor Carson, Emily Clark, Stephanie Cole, Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, Sarah Hill, Barbara J. Howe, Timothy J. Lockley, Stephanie McCurry, Diane Batts Morrow, and Penny L. Richards.

Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity.This second volume in the series ""New Currents in the History of Southern Economy and Society"" features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society.The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona - marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt.Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South's economic boom.""Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization"" clearly demonstrates that the South's embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn't mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits wer always part of the region's economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region's society and politics.