Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_

Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 16:57:30 -0600


Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 12:28:55 -0600 (CST)
From: Anthony G Carey < careyag@mail.auburn.edu >
Subject: Re: Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_

I also found Cashin's "culture of resignation" to a useful and
persuasive idea, subject of course to qualifications, many of which she
makes. In my early research on my new project, involving the
Cobb-Lamar families of Georgia, I have already read many, many letters
of women whose lives and thoughts fit Cashin's general description
rather well. Resignation to the will of God was, of course, a most
fundamental Christian virtue. And the struggle to be resigned to
loneliness, loss of children, the rigors of childrearing and home
management, nagging illness, etc. is a major theme in many letters.
The struggle to be resigned to "woman's place" in the world was in many
way analagous. It is certainly apparent that many of the Cobb-Lamar
women chafed, to a greater or lesser degree, under gender restrictions,
and some were either overtly or covertly critical of individual men
and/or men's ways in general. But, as Bertram Wyatt-Brown has
suggested, they also often seemed to see the expression of their own
frustrations as improper, as not in keeping with the Christian/female
resignation that they took as model for virtuous female thought and
behavior. Indeed, a theme in the letters is self-criticism regarding
their failure to live up to standards of resignation. A complex
subject, indeed, but I think Joan Cashin is rather closer to the mark
than not.

Anthony Gene "Tony" Carey Book Review Editor
Associate Professor The Alabama Review
History Department bamarev@mail.auburn.edu
Auburn University
310 Thach Hall Acting Graduate

Auburn, AL 36849-5207 Program Officer
careyag@mail.auburn.edu
334-844-6643

Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 14:06:08 -0600


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (February, 1998)

Joan E. Cashin, ed. _Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old
South_. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. x +
309 pp. Illustrations and index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8018-5306-0.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Sharon Halevi < s_halevi@netvision.net.il >,
University of Haifa, Israel.

The Mask of Resignation.

"'And yet, they say our voices are the softest, sweetest, in the world?'

"'No wonder. The base submission of our tone must be music in our
masters' ears.'"

_Mary Chesnut's Civil War_, p. 735

Joan Cashin's collection of the writings of white Southern women is an
excellent addition to the growing body of published primary sources and
monograph studies on the culture of the antebellum South. The collection
is divided into six thematic sections dealing with various aspects of
white women's lives and the issues that concerned them (family,
friendship, work, race, public life, and secession). The items in every
section are arranged chronologically and each of the 128 items is
annotated and preceded by a brief biographical note. This arrangement
enables the reader to discern the emerging patterns of women's culture and
the evolution of women's views on a key of issues, such as race and
seccesion. The selections are preceded by an introductory essay which
surveys the field of white Southern women's history since the 1970s to the
present. While not followed by an annotated bibliography, the notes to
the essay will provide students and readers with a basic reading list on
the subject.

Cashin is to be applauded for her choice of texts. Ranging from the
humorous to the poignant, from the dreary to the uplifting, the collection
traces the contours of white women's culture. Although most of the
writers belonged to property-holding families, Cashin makes a concerted
effort to move away from the traditional focus on women of the planter
class. She includes several selections from the papers of yeomen and
non-elite women (both urban and rural). Cashin alternates the writings of
older, married or widowed women with those of younger single women, those
of Protestant women with those of Jewish women. In an attempt to access
the lives of illiterate women and those of women who did not leave diaries
and letters, she includes wills, court proceedings, recipes, and literary
pieces. Cashin's choices (of documents and women) constantly and subtly
reiterate the fact that white women in the South were not a monolithic
group and their experiences were diverse.

In the introductory essay, Cashin focuses on the way historians have dealt
with the issue of white Southern female culture. She proposes that
historians of white Southern women give up using Northern women's culture
as a silent referent and cease assuming "that the only culture worthy of a
name had to result in political activity" (p. 7). Cashin correctly points
out that under these criteria women's culture in the North would be found
wanting as well, since the majority of white Northern women did not join
reform societies of any kind, and similar to Southern culture it too was
divided by class and race. Instead, Cashin suggests that historians adopt
an anthropological definition of culture: a set of learned behaviors, at
times internally inconsistent and permeable to other practices, shared by
members of a society. Cashin argues that this definition would enable
historians to delve into the uncharted depths of white Southern women's
culture and examine several issues which have remained relatively
neglected, such as the arrangement of female space, women's oral culture,
fashion, and the histories of women belonging to the South's religious and
ethnic minorities.

This is a strong collection of texts which will be an asset in any
classroom (once the paperback edition comes out). It is because of the
strengths of this collection (which I hope will garner the book its
well-earned success) that I have some misgivings about Cashin's decision
to characterize white Southern women's culture as "a culture of
resignation." The term does a disservice to this collection of texts. At
times it is a annoying misnomer, at others it undermines the main thrust
of Cashin's argument that an important paradigm of Southern women's
history needs to be reworked. It is this term which eventually leads
Cashin to fall back to the position she previously criticized and to
conclude that white Southern women's culture was eventually "a culture of
resignation, not a culture of reform," (p. 22) whose "fundamental premises
were that women should accept inequity, not resist it, and that they
should refrain from any involvement in partisan, electoral politics"
(p. 2). This conclusion is at odds with the evidence provided by some of
the texts in the collection and with the findings of other historians,
such as Victoria Bynum (_Unruly Women_) and Laura Edwards ("Sexual
Violence, Gender, Reconstruction"), whose work documents the ways in which
poor white women resisted, criticized, and at times took violent action
against the prevalent social order.

The choice of the term "a culture of resignation" is particularly baffling
in view of Cashin's call to look beyond the overt, public, and political
acts to the "hidden transcript" that lay at the base of white women's oral
culture and which is present in many of the texts in the collection.
Since Cashin introduces James Scott's concept of the "hidden transcript" I
am puzzled by her hesitance to incorporate its implications. Scott's
term, the "hidden transcript", cannot be read as resignation. Scott
argues that at the side of the subordinate discourse in the presence of
the dominant (the "public transcript"), exists a discourse concealed from
the eyes of the dominant (the "hidden transcript"). This "hidden
transcript" includes all those "speeches, gestures, and practices that
confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the public transcript"
(Scott, _Domination and the Art of Resistance_, p. 4-5). This suggests
that while subordinates may adopt a mask of resignation, they are far from
resigned to their lot. In fact they may be agitating against it, but
having grasped the price of open, public insubordination they have learnt
to conceal their criticism and discontent from the eyes of the dominant
group. The desire to conceal their activities leads subordinate groups to
be "complicitous in contributing to a sanitized official transcript"
(Scott, p. 87).

Both the pressure to conceal and the desire to express criticism and
discontent is evident in many of the texts. Most of the women expressed
only in private (in letters and in conversations) their discontent and
painful awareness of the constraints on their lives and the behavior of
their male relatives. They railed, ridiculed, joked, and passed caustic
remarks about their lot in life, while at other times they schooled
themselves to endure and submit. A few women expressed their discontent
publicly. They openly criticized the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth,
testified in court against a friend's abusive husband in view of the
system's notorious dismissal of such charges, or supported a church's
Sunday school classes for blacks in the face of threatened violence.
These were both private actions of personal courage (or stubbornness) and
public actions with political resonance. They should not be viewed as
isolated outbursts but as highlighted areas in a pattern of resistance,
albeit one which existed in a society where the sanctions for open
resistance were severe.

This criticism should not diminish the importance and usefulness of this
collection. I hope Cashin's essay will spark off further debate among
students and historians of the early republic about how we think about
power and its workings (hegemony, false consciousness, the rituals of
power and defiance) and the ways our work may be enriched by the
theoretical concepts and framework offered by work of anthropologists and
ethnologists and the members of the Subaltern Studies group.

References

Bynum, Victoria E. _Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual
Control in the Old South_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1992.

Edwards, Laura F. "Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the
Extension of Patriarchy in Granville Country, North Carolina." _North
Carolina Historical Review_ 68 (1991): 237-260.

Scott, James C. _Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts_. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.

Woodward, C. Vann, ed. _Mary Chesnut's Civil War_. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1981.

Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu .

Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 10:00:06 -0600


Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 07:58:15 -0500
From: Bertram Wyatt-Brown < bwyattb@history.ufl.edu >
Subject: Re: Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_

Although appreciating the positive remarks on the value of this
collection of Southern women's writings, I find myself in disagreement
with the reviewer's criticism of Joan Cashin's use of the term "culture
of resignation." Cashin proposes that concept in contrast to a culture
of reform. Surely she is right. Southern women were scarcely Margaret
Fullers. They might have sometimes used the term "lord and master" in
reference to husbands in a sarcastic vein but had, on the whole, no
idea of undermining the patriarchal situation in which they were
immersed and familiar. Resignation in this sense does not mean
wholehearted willingness to passive and complete subordination to men
acceptance, I think, but rather a sense that the world had been so
ordered that their pains, even humiliations had to be stoically
endured, and that female bravery consisted in submission to social
conventions, Christian evangelical doctrine and community opinion. It
is not easy for anyone today to understand the mentality of that kind
of accommodation to things as they were and to understand the indirect,
subtle, even subversive ways adopted to get around it. For Cashin to
try to do so is to be commended even if such an attitude was hardly the
way we might prefer it to have been. In all frankness, however, I
should add that I have not seen a copy of the work and therefore hope I
have not mischaracterized Cashin's point or the reviewer's interpretation.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 17:16:42 -0600


From: Sharon Halevi < s_halevi@netvision.net.il >
Subject: RE: Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 22:00:12 +-200

My thanks to both Anthony Carey and Bertran Wyatt-Brown for their
comments. I think we are in agreement about the merits of this book,
but disagree on the usage of the term "a culture of resignation".

Now, I am well aware of the fact that resignation is a fundamental
virtue in many religions (not just Christianity); however in practice
it is also a gendered (and some would argue a race and class) virtue.
Women were supposed to exhibit this particular virtue to a far greater
degree than men were. Resignation and submission to the will of God
has all too often been interpreted socially as resignation and
submission to the will of the powerful (in this case white, elite males).

Both respondents are correct in pointing out that this state was
achieved through struggle, was viewed as a form of female bravery and
does not connote passivity or complete submission. This was precisely
the strength of Cashin's collection. Cashin subtly (by her nuanced
choice of texts) works to disabuse the reader of any notion of female
passivity or submission. Indeed some women actively participated in
reshaping this virtue to reflect and satisfy their needs. In her essay
Cashin hints at the ways James Scott's term "the hidden transcript" may
(in Wyatt-Brown's words) "help us understand the indirect, subtle, even
subversive ways adopted to get around it".

These nuances and complexities are completely lost in the term "a
culture of resignation" which flattens and homogenizes the lives and
experiences of Southern women. White, elite, Christian evangelical
women and their value system come to stand for "Southern women",
regardless of race, class, religious or ethnic background. While the
"culture of resignation" may well have typified the ideals and behavior
of the first group, we do not have the information from which to assert
that it typified the ideals and behavior of Southern women, as a group.
We are only beginning our investigations into the lives of Italian,
French Catholic, and Jewish Southern women (to use Cashin's examples).
Did these women view resignation as a virtue and ideal? If they did,
did it have the same meaning, did it manifest itself in the same way?

I am concerned that the term "culture of resignation" may be used as a
silent referent to assess the behavior of Southern women, as a result
the behavior of many women may come to be labeled as deviant. If, as
Cashin persuasively argues, the term "culture of reform" cannot serve
as a catch-all phrase for Northern women's culture nor as the
yard-stick for assessing women's cultures in the United States, then
the term "culture of resignation" cannot perform the same feat for
Southern women's culture.

Sharon Halevi
Dept. of General Studies
Univ. of Haifa
s_halevi@netvision.net.il

Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 11:38:01 -0600


Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 11:23:26 -0600 (CST)
From: Anthony G Carey < careyag@mail.auburn.edu >
Subject: Re: Halevi on Cashin, _Our Common Affairs_

It seems to me that an underlying issue in this discussion is the
familiar problem of typicality and (maybe versus) diversity. Since
millions of individuals and several decades are involved, no "label"
can possibly capture the vast range of experience. The same is true of
nearly every issue in every field of history. Yet, despite this,
historians make efforts to discover and define central tendencies in
cultures. I take it that this was what Joan Cashin was doing with
"culture of resignation," and I found her contention that this was a
central tendency in the Old South initially persuasive--but not the
last word by any means. And it seems to me that "culture of
resignation" has to be engaged by postulating alternative or competing
central tendencies, not just by pointing out exceptions. Perhaps I
should let Bertram Wyatt-Brown draw his own analogies, but the concept
of honor offers an opportunity for comparison. Even given that there
were exceptions to and contradictions within southern honor, I wonder
how many southern historians would deny that concern for honor was a
central tendency within southern (male?) culture.

TC

Anthony Gene "Tony" Carey Book Review Editor
Associate Professor The Alabama Review
History Department bamarev@mail.auburn.edu
Auburn University
310 Thach Hall Acting Graduate

Auburn, AL 36849-5207 Program Officer
careyag@mail.auburn.edu
334-844-6643