Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South

Marie S. Molloy, a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, has conducted an amazing amount of research for this book, consulting 83 separate collections in six different archives, as well as another 21 published primary sources and Race, Slavery and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1777-1867. She culled these sources for letters, diaries, journals, and court cases and petitions by or about single white women born or living in slaveholding families between 1810 and 1860. Throughout the book, Molloy uses stories, excerpts, and wonderful quotes from the women she discovered in her research, and these glimpses into the lives of single women are the strongest aspect of this work