Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law - Hardcover

Schweninger, Loren

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807835692 ISBN 13: 9780807835692

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Synopsis

In the antebellum South, divorce was an explosive issue. As one lawmaker put it, divorce was to be viewed as a form of "madness," and as another asserted, divorce reduced communities to the "lowest ebb of degeneracy." How was it that in this climate, the number of divorces rose steadily during the antebellum era? In Families in Crisis, Loren Schweninger uses previously unexplored records to argue that the difficulties these divorcing families faced reveal much about the reality of life in a slave-holding society as well as the myriad difficulties confronted by white southern families who chose not to divorce. Basing his argument on almost 800 divorce cases from the southern United States, Schweninger explores the impact of divorce and separation on white families and on the enslaved and provides insights on issues including domestic violence, interracial adultery, alcoholism, insanity, and property relations. He examines how divorce and separation laws changed, how married

About this title

Book Description:

"Dazzling in its sweep and depth, Schweninger's study of divorce, slavery, and the law provides a window into an entire matrix of household and social relations. Gender, race, and property relations are considered across class lines, all within the South's institutions of marriage and slavery."--Victoria E. Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

About the Author:

Loren Schweninger is Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is coauthor, with the late John Hope Franklin, of In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807835692
• ISBN 13: 9780807835692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256