This dissertation explores the position of slaveholding widows in the eastern states of the American South between 1790 and 1860. Widowhood significantly changed the responsibilities and social position of slaveholding women, endowing them with legal independence and property rights. Slaveholding widows routinely did white men's work: managing plantations, hiring overseers, commanding slaves, and contracting with merchants. Slaveholding widows' actions as household heads and independent women raise critical questions about the ways that gender and slavery shaped white women's access to and exercise of power. Using concepts of feminine dependence, familial interdependence, and master-class privilege to facilitate and justify their work, these widows avoided being treated as transgressive or anomalous. Performing both women's and men's work in a society supposedly characterized by rigid patriarchy, these widows helped to shape the meanings of gender for their households, their families, and their communities. Moreover, the comparatively advantageous position of its widows reveals the extent and the limits of the slaveholding class's power: widows participated in, contributed to, and benefited from the "fictive mastery" of the slaveholding class. The study of slaveholding widows also illuminates regional and life-cycle variations in American women's relationships to family, property, households, and networks of exchange.
