Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in Southern Studies
First Advisor
Kathryn McKee
Second Advisor
Jodi Skipper
Third Advisor
Kris Belden-Adams
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
The scholarship on women in the antebellum American South is extensive. Since the 1980s, historians have debated the relationships between white plantation mistresses and the Black women they enslaved. This project adds to that conversation by examining the extant material culture from Dayton, Alabama, to understand the lives of slave-holding mother and daughter, Thyrza Jane Catlin Cade (1811-1876) and Adolpha Thompson Cade Reeves (1845-1888) and the families they enslaved. This project combines gender studies with art historical analysis to ask questions about whether stories of white, elite slaveholding planter families from the Deep South anything have left to teach us. Through the use of primary source historical research such as newspaper articles, census records, and family probate records as well as material culture analysis, this project examines antebellum Dayton through a study of its extant material culture to helps expose the ways that gender, race, and power intersect with an understanding of southern place.
This project illuminates the ways that the study of objects can help tell the stories of women, both enslaved and free, in the antebellum South. I analyze a pair of portraits of Thyrza Jane and Adolpha and conclude that material culture can help us understand the ways that white women played a notable role in reinforcing the patriarchal structures that upheld slavery because it was ultimately to the benefit of elite, white slaveholding women to actively participate in this system.
Recommended Citation
Conte, Laura Corran, "Portraits of Dayton, Alabama: Images of Women and Place in the Antebellum South" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2801.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2801