The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South

This study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers a serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, the author sets before us the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master.