HIS306: Women & Gender in US to 1870

School to Recital: Women Teaching Music

November 24, 2019 by tiadams@davidson.edu

T. Adams, J. Griffin, S. Moskowitz, B. Riley, with I. Padalecki

The profession of teaching is often associated with women; in 2019, approximately eighty percent of elementary school teachers were women.¹ This feminization of teaching originated in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the Market Revolution, the American economy became more market-oriented, and households became less self-sufficient. This drove an increasing number of men off farms and toward jobs that paid wages or salaries. Literacy became a required skill and teaching boys to read a necessity. In addition to performing unpaid domestic labor and childcare, women, too, felt pressure to earn income to support their families, but their options were limited by notions of gender-appropriate behavior.²Out of these economic changes emerged the ideology of “separate spheres,” which presented women as inherently suited to maintaining households as a sanctuary from the public sphere. Women’s work generally was not considered skilled “work” to be compensated monetarily; this status was primarily reserved for work done by men (manufacturing, resource extraction, craft, and commerce).³

Feminized Morality

The Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in which many Americans developed a personal relationship with God through participation in evangelical Christianity, also shaped gender roles in the early nineteenth century. This caused an uptick in women’s participation in Protestant churches, including Presbyterianism, increasing the association of womanhood with purity and morality.⁴

This was also related to the concept of Republican Motherhood, which emphasized women’s role in educating children to be virtuous and literate citizens that could participate in civic life. For literate women, teaching their children to read became another facet of their domestic responsibilities. The important duty fell mainly on mothers, again emphasizing women’s critical role as educators of their children.⁵

These shifts, along with the notion of separate spheres, allowed women to access the profession of teaching as an “extension of mothering,” in which women were seen as uniquely equipped to instill moral values in and provide care to children in a setting that mirrored the domestic home.⁶ This newfound ability of women to access teaching as one of the few legitimate careers open to them was clearly shown in the story of Mrs. William A. Holt, who established the first secondary school for girls in Davidson in 1860.⁷

1959 Newspaper article about Mrs. Holt’s school.⁸

Music as Access to Academia

While white Southerners expected respectable women to confine their labor to their homes and families, musical performance played an important role in early Davidson as an entry point into the public sphere for women and a source of entertainment for the whole community. The male and female members of the church club made up the choir and also performed for the students in Chambers, the main academic building at Davidson College.⁹

In southern society, music also allowed nineteenth-century women to access income as teachers. Southern white women of the upper class traditionally had access to music instruction, a talent seen as desirable in a spouse. Middle-class families aspired for their daughters to have such skills, too. For this reason, women who worked as educators often taught music because doing so conformed to gender norms and did not challenge the widely held belief that women were incapable of teaching subjects that required reason and logic, like math or science. Mary Brown Hinely, a piano instructor and choral director in Georgia, argues that the progress of women’s opportunities within American music parallels that of women’s progress within American society.¹⁰

Eulalia V. Cornelius was a music teacher who taught piano and singing lessons in Davidson. Because music lessons were an extra expense in an economically volatile period, these women likely taught children of middle- and upper-class families.¹¹ In the 1900 census, Eulalia Cornelius’ profession is not listed; only her husband’s profession, cradle-making, appears. That a census-taker obscured her skill and profession is not surprising; excluding women’s paid work emphasized the “distinctive male claim to the role of the ‘breadwinner’” that characterized the period. ¹² Nonetheless, Cornelius’s recital pamphlet makes it clear that she had a profession and generated income.

1900 Census with the Cornelius family listed — U.S. 1900 Census.¹³ Eulalia and her family are located in the bottom rows.

Printed original copy of music program with names of performers and pieces — Eulalia Cornelius’ recital program.¹⁴

Though music classes were not incorporated into North Carolinian school curriculums until the latter part of the 1800s,¹⁵ women who were music teachers earned income before this period, some of which could support their families. In an 1869 letter, Davidson resident Ann Mills wrote to her niece Ella about her professional prospects. She explained that several parents asked her to teach their children and included the wages they offered her. Mills explained: “I will teach and be glad of the chance, for I can help my family more by teaching than any other way.”¹⁶ The inclusion of the rates offered for her teaching capabilities suggests that neighbors compensated and acknowledged women’s labor–even when officials and census-takers did not. This is a cautionary reminder that singular historical narratives told by government documents, like the census, underestimate the importance of southern women’s paid, and unpaid, labor in the nineteenth century.

1869 handwritten letter from Ann Mills to Ella — Ann Mills’ Letter to Ella.¹⁷

In late-nineteenth-century Davidson white, middle-class women expanded the domestic, maternal sphere to include certain paid jobs. Teaching music became an accessible way to participate in public life while also fulfilling the idealized feminine role of educating and raising moral children.18 Therefore, through teaching music, white women in Davidson were able to leverage the expectations of domesticity and motherhood. While excluded from the faculty of the college because of their gender, records in the Davidson College Archive provide evidence that female educators were nonetheless part of the intellectual community here. As teachers and performers, female musicians nurtured young minds and the emerging arts scene on campus.

First Ladies: The Women of the Morrison Family

November 23, 2019 by mabursis@davidson.edu

M. Bursis, C. Clawson, and H. Maltzan, with I. Padalecki

Reverend Robert Hall Morrison was the first president of Davidson College, founded in 1837. He and his wife, Mary Graham Morrison, raised twelve children in a white, upper-class Presbyterian household shaped by the belief in God-given separate spheres. Under the ideology of separate spheres, a gendered social hierarchy delineated the roles of men from women. Understood to be morally pure, women were expected to perform uncompensated domestic labor while their husbands worked within the public sphere of civic life, including higher education and the ministry.

As wives and mothers, women had a role to play in preparing boys for this work, and the Morrisons’ commitment to education extended beyond Davidson College; four of the six Morrison daughters attended Salem Female Academy, a Moravian boarding school.¹ The Morrisons also owned slaves. A close study of the Morrison family including slave ownership, female education, and their participation in the Presbyterian church enables us to understand the experiences of women at Davidson College during its founding years.

The Morrisons and Slavery

Representative of Antebellum North Carolina in general, Davidson College existed in a world dependent on human bondage and exploitation. Although census statistics show that under seven percent of the free population owned slaves in nearby Alamance, Orange, and Wake counties, historian Daniel Fountain explains that this statistic obscures the widespread influence of slavery in the region.² Fountain looks not at slave ownership but instead at slave-owning households and their economic impact.³ Under his definition, the share of free people regularly interacting with enslaved people and benefiting from their labor jumps to nearly one out of every three white North Carolinians.⁴ Members of these slave-owning households constituted the Antebellum elite, including the president and several professors of the University of North Carolina. It is important to note this intersection between higher education and slave ownership.⁵

In Mecklenberg County, the influence of slavery was likely even more pervasive. Historian Thomas Hanchett estimates that, although less than one percent of the county’s population were planters–claiming ownership of more than two hundred enslaved people–twenty-five percent of the population claimed ownership of at least one enslaved person.⁶ By the 1850s, forty percent of the county’s residents were enslaved people.⁷ The Morrison family participated directly in and benefitted from this system. In 1850, Robert Hall Morrison claimed ownership of fifty-three enslaved people.⁸

Robert Hall Morrison's 1850 "Slave Schedule." Handwritten table. — 1850 Slave Schedule for Davidson’s first president, Robert Hall Morrison.⁹

In this context, the Morrison women navigated dual identities as both privileged slave owners and women subject to the legal system of coverture, in which women could not have legal identity or property independent of their fathers and husbands and were barred from many professions. Despite broader limiting gender norms, slave ownership made life easier for the women of the Morrison family by freeing them from the most monotonous and unpleasant household labor. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes white planter women as members of “a society that had privileged them as white yet subordinated them as female.”¹⁰

White Presbyterian Women

While the ideology of separate spheres encouraged women in the Antebellum South to focus on domestic labor, wives of Presbyterian ministers (including Mary Graham Morrison) also held a public role in the community. In this period, “Cent Societies” or “Praying Societies” provided social opportunities and raised money and support for the Church.¹¹ The development of regional and national women’s boards of home and foreign missions also started around the Civil War.¹² Though Presbyterian leadership prevented women from becoming ministers, they found authority and leadership in organizations such as the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands.¹³ Ministers’ wives, in particular, held power because their husbands and churches saw them as useful in turning other women into more active church members and in welcoming outsiders. ¹⁴

Antebellum Education for Women

Because slave-owning families like the Morrisons depended on enslaved women to perform domestic labor, their daughters had greater access to education than the daughters of yeoman families. While the Civil War overall had “a devastating effect on higher education in the South” for men, young women’s schools flourished.¹⁵ Formal education for women in the Antebellum South consisted of academics as well as religious instruction, sewing, and “polite culture.”¹⁶ Historian Christie Farnham explains that “parents never intended for [female students] to work outside the home”; thus, southern girls’ education largely enforced traditional, patriarchal gender roles and prepared these girls for lives as wives and mothers of promising young men.¹⁷ This accurately depicts the Morrison family women. Mary Graham Morrison attended Salem Female Academy from 1815 to 1816, and her daughters each attended the academy, married prominent men, and raised children.

Photo of Salem Academy and Salem College sign, 2019. — Salem Academy and College, 2019.¹⁸

Salem Female Academy had a progressive curriculum for the early-nineteenth century, according to historian Frances Griffin.¹⁹ ineteenth-century students took courses in a variety of academic and artistic subjects, including “Writing, Arithmetic, […] Botany, Algebra, […] Drawing and Painting.”²⁰ Students had strict schedules, and “any so-called ‘free’ time was to be used for plain sewing, ‘marking’ (pattern making), or knitting.”²¹ Reflecting the institution’s commitment to reinforcing traditional gender roles, Salem did not accept girls who were over fifteen years old, as this was “marrying age.”²²

Typed course catalogue page for Davidson College, 1842. — Davidson College course catalogue, 1842

²³

This curriculum contrasts from that at all-male Davidson College. According to the 1842 course catalogue, all students in the same academic year took the same courses, including subjects like “English Grammar, Arithmetic and Geography,” and “Latin Grammar, Mair’s Introduction, Caesar’s Commentaries, and Virgil.”²⁴ Davidson offered its male students fewer extracurriculars and focused on classical studies, while Salem provided its female students with creative classes and a broader selection of academic courses.

Mary Graham Morrison's obituary. One full page of typed text. — Mary Graham Morrison’s obituary.

²⁵

Several of the Morrison daughters married educators who became Confederate generals during the Civil War. Mary Anna Morrison became the second wife of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson.²⁶ Isabella and Eugenia also married Confederate generals, D.H. Hill, a Davidson College professor, and Rufus Barringer, respectively.²⁷ Recognizing that race and class shaped women’s experiences as much as gender, the documentary record provides insight into how elite Southern white women were socialized and why they supported the Confederate war effort. Born into lives of prominence and respectability, women from slave-owning white families sought to maintain the privilege and status to which they were accustomed. Records of enslavement caution us against romanticization, however. It is important to recognize that here, as elsewhere in the Antebellum South, elite women exploited the labor of enslaved women whose names do not appear in the records of the household and college their labor sustained.

The Helper Hotel: Women’s Labor in Early Davidson

November 22, 2019 by cemiller@davidson.edu

C. Miller and F. Resweber, with I. Padalecki

Until the development of the field of women’s history in the 1960s, historians often limited their analysis of nineteenth-century women’s roles to that of wives and daughters. Listed beneath male heads-of-households on the census and ignored in many common primary sources, women were considered secondary contributors to their families and communities — if historians considered them at all. Over the last fifty years, historians have proven that women and girls were key participants in the workforce and economy, including in the town of Davidson.

Historians have described the lives of nineteenth-century women and men as characterized by an idealized separation of gendered spheres. Known for her innovative research about the economic value created through domestic labor, historian Jeanne Boydston explained that the ideology of separate spheres normalized a system in which men worked for wages in the public sphere and women cared for children and ran households in a private one. Men’s work was valued as skilled labor and given monetary compensation, whereas women’s labor cleaning, caring for children, and preparing food in their homes was uncompensated.¹ Despite the ideology of separate spheres, working-class white women and women of color regularly labored in the market economy. They often did so in other women’s homes or turned their homes into income-generating workplaces by taking in laundry or borders, referred to as the accommodations business.² ³

The accommodations business was particularly important in nineteenth-century Davidson because town families provided housing and meals to students and faculty. Because men usually owned these houses and businesses, women’s labor in them was often obscured in primary sources. For example, take the Helper family business, founded in 1848.⁴ Hanson P. Helper was a prominent businessman who converted his general merchandise store across from Davidson College into a thirteen-room hotel while simultaneously opening a new store and post office on the property. The people of Davidson respected Helper, referring to him as “one of the most highly thought of citizens of Mecklenburg County.⁵ The Helper businesses were family operations, however, to which his wives (he was widowed and later remarried) and children contributed. By understanding nineteenth-century gender roles and divisions of labor, we can read primary sources about Hanson to learn about Sallie, Martha, the ten surviving children he had with the two women, and the enslaved women who also lived in the household.

" " — The 1977 certificate declaring the Helper Hotel a historic site, as declared by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Properties Commission.⁶

Female Labor in the Helper Household

Historical records show multiple female laborers in this household over time, and the evolution of this family’s composition hints at common demographic trends in the mid-nineteenth century South. In addition to Hanson, the 1860 census lists one adult woman, Sallie, as well as two children and an unrelated male laborer.⁷ Hanson also leased three enslaved people, including a twenty-five-year-old woman and a twelve-year-old girl, evidenced in the 1860 slave schedule. ⁸This leasing arrangement may have accommodated the seasonal nature of the family’s hospitality business. Slave schedules do not include the name of the enslaved people, a reality that frustrates historians and makes research challenging. Additionally, by separating enslaved and free women onto two documents, the documentary record makes invisible the collaboration required between enslaved and free white women to complete essential domestic labor.

" " — The 1860 census showing Hanson Helper as a druggist with the value of his personal estate listed as $13,000. His wife and two children are listed, as well as their live-in laborer.⁹

A section of the 1860 slave schedule, in which Mr. Helper is listed as leasing three enslaved people from local slave-owners: a 12-year-old girl, a 25-year-old woman, and an 18-year-old man.

By 1870, Hanson had remarried to Mattie (presumably after the death of Sallie), and they were parenting five children between the ages of twelve and one years old.¹⁰ The family continued to grow by the 1880 census as son John had moved out of the household while Mattie and Lillie, Hanson’s eldest daughter by Sallie, continued to care for the remaining children. Another young man also worked and boarded with the family.¹¹ Though we cannot know for sure why John left while the Helper’s female children stayed, we can infer that the demand for their domestic labor to keep the Helper business running did not lessen simply because these children became adults. Ultimately, that these women were still listed under Mr. Helper’s household in the 1880 census demonstrates remarkable stability, even through Sallie’s probable death, in a familial structure in which the Helper’s home and business both relied on the daily, domestic labor of women.

Though the Helper business is recorded and therefore remembered as the property of Hanson Helper, women’s labor was essential to the creation and running of this business.This is because coverture, the dominant gendered legal system during the period in which the Helper’s ran their business, allowed a husband total control over his wife’s body, wages, and any property she inherited..¹² Because of this, anything Sallie or Mattie Helper produced would have been listed in Hanson Helper’s name. This is why many women, with few exceptions of “keeping house,” are listed as lacking occupations in the 1860, 1870, and 1880 census. Census takers likely focused on obtaining an accurate count of women’s children—emphasizing their reproductive worth. Much of the labor these women and their daughters performed in the family store is effectively missing from the record.

Because it is almost impossible to track the trajectory of each Helper woman, we investigate the collective roles the women played in the household, store, home, and community. We do not know who performed which tasks, but enslaved women usually performed the heaviest labor in Southern households. In a typical week, these women and girls were responsible for a variety of tasks in the home.¹³Sallie and later Mattie, their daughters, and enslaved women and girls prepared and preserved food, likely purchasing raw goods from nearby farmers to do so while selling some in the family store.¹⁴ Enslaved women likely did the hard, manual labor of chopping wood, building fires, and pumping water for each meal. The endless work needed to feed family members, employees, and hotel guests is often overlooked in the historical record.

Women were also responsible for laundry, sewing, and ironing. The Helper women likely made some of their clothes, as their store sold fabrics and sewing materials.¹⁵ Clearly, the work of “running the household” required a wide variety of skills and talents, despite that it was undervalued as an unskilled, inherent component of womanhood that did not merit monetary compensation.

The Helper Businesses

The Helper Hotel existed at the intersection of women’s domestic labor and the male-dominated market economy. Hotels were commonly owned by men, but the upkeep was largely considered women’s work.¹⁶ Although not documented, most of the domestic labor in the hotel was performed by Helper’s wife, older daughters, enslaved women before emancipation, and potentially hired servants after the war: they washed, cleaned, and cooked. Helper’s literate daughters potentially worked in the store and could have assisted in record keeping, as women in mercantile families commonly did.¹⁷

"A yellowed invoice page with cursive writing. Shows a long list of items purchased, with amounts and prices." — Invoice from Helper store showing items purchased, such as alcohol, sugar, spices, tea, and indigo.¹⁸

Though the Helpers employed a live-in male clerk via the 1870 census, the store’s success in town suggests that Mattie and the older daughters likely worked the counter of the store alongside hired employees.¹⁹ The Helper women facilitated purchasing, wrapped packages, and used the store as an outlet to connect with community members. It is not known exactly how much this labor was worth, but a nineteenth-century woman working as a clerk in the Midwest made about thirty dollars a month—demonstrating that the work of the Helper women was of high economic value, even if they were never paid.²⁰

Davidson College and the store maintained good relations—students recalled fondly Mr. Helper’s kindness and intelligence.²¹ Davidson College also accepted a loan from Mr. Helper as they rebuilt after the Civil War.²² Further, while the college launched lawsuits against local businesses for selling alcohol to students, there is no record of such a lawsuit against the Helper business, despite that store ledgers indicate the sale of alcohol in the Helper store in 1873. The Helper store and the women who worked there provided important services, products, and community to Davidson College students.²³

"Type-written page showing the history of the Helper family, as written by Lillie Helper." — A family history written by Helper’s daughter, Lillie, in honor of the hotel becoming a historic landmark.²⁴

Although the domestic labor of the Helper women was unpaid and left unrecognized in that only their Hanson’s name was legally attached to the business, it was not unimportant. Rather, the lack of pay and historical recognition attributed to the Helper women reflects a broader devaluation of the work associated with womanhood. In recognizing their work, agency, and skill, we can trouble the historical master narrative that seeks to make their contributions to the Davidson community invisible.

Dancing, Deviance, and Daily Resistance

November 22, 2019 by mamcelveen@davidson.edu

M. McElveen, I. Padalecki, M. Rankins

On June 8th, 1844, Margaret White attended a “dancing party” in the town of Davidson. Although not eligible to attend Davidson College because of her gender, White was a member of Davidson Presbyterian Church and was expected to adhere to the church’s moral standards. At this time, Davidson’s college, church, and town formed one governing entity that strictly prohibited dancing.¹ The pastor of the church “admonished” White for her crime.²

black cursive ink on white page. — Davidson College Presbyterian Church Minutes from June 9th, 1844. The Church Scribe records: “Having been reported that one of our members Miss Margaret White had taken part in the exercises of a dancing party, it was agreed in session that the Pastor should confer with and admonish her in relation to that practice . . .”

Dancing in Davidson College

While often considered more liberal than other Protestant denominations today, nineteenth-century Presbyterianism entailed strict moral codes enforced through community supervision. Dancing fell into a broader category of religious rule-breaking and “worldly amusement” that also included drinking, pre-marital sex, adultery, and profanity. ³ Presbyterians perceived dancing as an impure activity that invited perverse forms of sexual pleasure, especially for women.⁴ The consequence could range from pastoral admonishment to ex-communication from the church community.⁵ In this way, the Presbyterian Church functioned as an extra-legal determinant of social mores and arbiter of corrective discipline.

Although religious institutions across the United States acted in this role, social mores were geographically and culturally situated. Just a mile north of Davidson, Iredell County Methodists viewed “shouting, weeping, falling and . . . exhibiting [religious] enthusiasm” as representative of a close relationship with God. For Methodists, such physical expressiveness in worship garnered spiritual-social power, particularly for women, while Presbyterians labeled such acts as suspect.⁶ Further, in communities with large Methodist populations, like Mooresville, residents understood physical expression as compatible with pious womanhood. Conversely, in Presbyterian towns, respectable citizens deemed these actions as expressions of feminine deviance. At this time, Davidson was deeply entrenched in Presbyterianism, a religious ideology members of this community utilized to claim moral superiority over surrounding areas. This difference in religious perceptions of social dance can perhaps be further explained by the fact that Methodists tended to be of lower economic strata, and idealized standards of white womanhood were harder for women who had to work in the fields and perform manual labor to attain. Women like Margaret White, from wealthier Presbyterian communities, had more to lose by exhibiting “scandalous” behavior; for Margaret, one dance could prevent marriage to a wealthy Davidson student, while a woman in Methodist Mooresville would not likely have had that opportunity to lose.⁷

Presbyterian moral prescriptions were not limited to women. Henry E. Fries, a Presbyterian student of Davidson College in 1876, wrote in a letter to his mother that he would no longer partake “in the dancing portion of parties” as it was a “worldly pleasure, though apparently innocent, [that] come[s] between the sinner and his God.”⁸ Religious punishment existed for both male and female Presbyterians engaging in the “worldly pleasures” of dancing. However, it was primarily when women participated in social dancing that Presbyterian leaders understood this action as inherently related to impure, illegal behaviors like extra-marital sex and fornication.⁹ This was due to the social standard of “separate spheres.” While white men engaged in the corrupt “sphere” of politics, material production, and economic development, these powerful men expected white women to exist only within a morally pure “sphere” defined by uncompensated reproductive and domestic labor.¹⁰Perhaps the association between the impurity of social dancing and the role ascribed to white women as guardians of social purity, an extension of separate spheres ideology, prompted Henry Fries to write about his moral failings to his mother, versus a male friend, father, or brother.

Letter written in cursive on faded yellow paper — Letter written by Davidson College student, Henry Fries, to his mother on April 2nd, 1876.

Agency and Fornication

White women in Presbyterian Davidson performed deviance by exercising bodily agency outside of pious, domestic womanhood (for example, attending a dancing party).¹¹ The crime of social dancing was closely aligned with legal definitions of feminine deviance. Local courts frequently accused women of fornication.¹² Fornication, used to indict women for participating in interracial or adulterous sex, was primarily leveraged against poor women of color.¹³ Like social dancing, this charge made deviant women’s claims of bodily autonomy and pursuits of sex outside of marriage. Together, legal and religious definitions of feminine deviance that focused on women’s autonomous, non-reproductive use of their bodies assumed that women were defined by their reproductive capabilities rather than their intellect. By claiming agency and pleasure for their bodies, these women were deviant. That deviance was so closely related to use of the body makes sense, given that the physical body is often seen as the site through which institutions like churches define and enforce normative social codes of behavior. For example, by deeming social dance impure, churches assert their authority in describing what is and isn’t a permissible use of one’s body.¹⁴

black and white newspaper clipping, four mentions of the word fornication are highlighted in yellow — This article from The Democrat, a Charlotte newspaper, written on Friday, January 18th, 1878, reports on local crime. On this particular date, there were four accusations of fornication recorded in the crime log.

In the case of both dancing and fornication, the legal and extralegal institutions that defined morality criminalized marginalized women who used their bodies for their own personal pleasure, rather than their husband’s.¹⁵ Because wealthy, nineteenth-century white women reproduced the white race in the South, the deviance the deviance they performed was seen as especially egregious, as their behavior directly implicated the reputations of the white fathers and husbands expected to protect them. Because white poverty was equated with immorality, the state and community institutions like churches often saw it as their legal role to extend the patriarchal authority of these protective men in places where their own authority was weak; for example, in reference to dance parties.¹⁶

Deviance and the Institution of Slavery

Under the institution of slavery, Black women also destabilized the boundaries of gender and race. Enslaved Black women participated in secret social dances that provided them with “moments of relief from black gender hierarchies as well as from slaveholding control.”¹⁷ The bodily deviance projected onto women of color includes and extends beyond fornication and dancing.¹⁸ For enslaved persons, judgment rarely, if ever, reached the courtroom. Rather, white slave-owners took matters into their own violent hands, because an enslaved person who violated the very laws that denied their humanity inherently took part in acts of resistance against the slave system.

Additionally, enslaved women engaged in everyday resistance to deprive slave owners of property and profit. These acts of rebellion ranged from feigning illness to committing arson.¹⁹ Mary Lacy, the wife of Davidson College President Drury Lacy, accused an enslaved woman, Aunt Maria, of pretending to be ill in order to avoid work. Additionally, Mary suspected bootleg parties were occurring near campus in the woods, hosted and attended by enslaved people.²⁰ Though feigning illness or sneaking away for clandestine bootleg parties might seem like relatively small acts of deviance, this demonstrates that by reclaiming time and withholding labor, enslaved women asserted agency within a racialized economic system that depended on their exploitation.²¹

By governing appropriate behavior, powerful extra-legal institutions like the Presbyterian church and the plantation collaborated with legal institutions to label certain people and actions as deviant.²² Many activities labeled deviant by patriarchal society, including dancing and fornication, reinforced the boundaries of moral, normative womanhood and served as justification for the control of women by white men. Deviant women threatened even the most powerful institutions by defying social control. Whether through claiming sexuality and agency by attending dance parties or undermining the institution of slavery, deviant women of the nineteenth-century South pushed the boundaries of their ascribed gendered and racial roles, reclaiming their bodies as their own even under profound oppression.

Women of the Ladies Missionary Society

November 22, 2019 by gmpearson@davidson.edu

T. Hagan, S. Harden, G. Pearson, with I. Padalecki

The history of Davidson College is inextricably intertwined with the Presbyterian church and the work of religious women. In the nineteenth-century South, doctrine, worship, and social circles centered around the church played a large role both in public life and the socialization of individuals. Though women of the Davidson College Presbyterian Church faced uniquely gendered expectations of their religious involvement, these women were by no means idle or powerless. Popular nineteenth-century conceptions of gender idealized social arrangements in which men and women occupied “separate spheres:” men would work for wages in trades and professions, while women would serve their families as pious and domestic moral guardians who managed the home. Religious institutions provided a unique middle-ground between public and private spheres. This is exemplified by the formation and work of the Ladies Missionary Society (formerly known as the Ladies Benevolent Society). This group of white Davidson women used their high status and membership in the local church and missionary society to leverage power in social, spiritual, and financial arenas.

Church History

In 1837, Robert Hall Morrison, a Presbyterian minister and the founding president of Davidson College, established the Davidson College Presbyterian Church. The small congregation gathered in the dining hall until the official chapel building was ready for use. In its first decades, the congregation consisted primarily of college students (who were required to attend), faculty members and their families, and some local residents. The activities of Davidson College Presbyterian Church structured life in this small town. These included Sunday morning service, Sunday school, daily morning chapel services, and Wednesday prayer meetings. Women possessed informal authority in several church-related activities; for example, they were Sunday school teachers with disciplinary powers. ¹

Ladies Missionary Society

In 1876, Lillie Helper and Mary Lafferty, the then-single daughters of prominent local families, organized a religious service organization for women called the Ladies Benevolent Society. Later, when the new church was built, the members renamed themselves as the Ladies Missionary Society. Women of the Presbyterian Church have a rich history of missionary work, and Davidson women were not unique. This tradition began as a way for American Presbyterian women to exert power outside of the domestic sphere without defying the separate spheres ideology that confined them to household labor. Missionization also served as a vehicle for the spread of Anglo-American social and economic norms. The same beliefs correlating whiteness, civilization, and Protestant Christianity that normalized Jim Crow in the South also inspired the so-called uplift of other non-white, non-Christian people in other regions of the world. ²

The constitution of the Ladies Missionary Society includes a preamble, a statement of purpose, and articles detailing how the society was to be funded, when and where to meet, and what meetings would entail. The society met monthly to read articles selected by members. Their women’s study focused on current mission work undertaken by Presbyterians. At each meeting, the president appointed a person to research a missionary field in America, Asia, and Europe or Africa. At the next meeting, the selected members presented their findings to the group. This collaborative form of self-education is notable considering that the college denied admission to female students at this time based on widely-held beliefs that higher education was not suitable for girls. It is logical to assume that these women would have utilized the small college library and sought out information from faculty, particularly because some of these men were their fathers and husbands. This tension between the college’s formal exclusion of female students and the presence of women as active learners existed until the transition to formal co-education in 1972 ³

"page 1 of the Ladies Missionary Society Constitution" — Page 1 of the Ladies Missionary Constitution

"Second page of the constitution" — Page 2 of the Ladies Missionary Society Constitution

"third page of the constitution" — Page 3 of the Ladies Missionary Society Constitution

As an organization focused on moral reform, the society Helper and Lafferty established was emblematic of other women’s missionary societies in the South. The women raised and donated money to aid missions in other countries even while many of their non-white neighbors lacked resources. To address local needs would have required these women, who were white and comparatively privileged, to acknowledge the dire economic outcomes of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South and challenge the patriarchal authority of white men in their community. They instead normalized charitable efforts directed at communities elsewhere across the globe rather than people in need in the town of Davidson and the region directly impacted by the college.4 Acknowledging the broader context is imperative to fully understanding the Ladies Missionary Society, and looking closely at specific documents from the Davidson College Church and Archives enables us to understand how white women used missionary work as a social outlet and to demonstrate their status. ⁴

Meeting Minutes

The Davidson College Archives holds a minute book that provides extensive detail on society meetings, including financial records and specific tasks done by individual members. In the 1885 minutes, four women emerge as prominent leaders: Helper and Lafferty, Mrs. Dupuy, and Mrs. Knox. It is telling that Mrs. Dupuy and Mrs. Knox are not referred to within archival materials by their first names; even in spaces of relative empowerment for women, they were defined by their legal submission to their husbands.

Helper and Lafferty established the Ladies Missionary Society, and Mrs. Dupuy and Mrs. Knox became president and vice president.⁵ All four of these women came from prominent families and married well-respected men. Lillie Helper was the daughter of Hanson P. Helper, a general store and hotel owner, and Mary Lafferty was the daughter of a deceased Presbyterian minister and Davidson College trustee. Mrs. Dupuy’s husband acted as one of the six elders in the church, and Mrs. Knox’s husband served as one of the four Deacons. ⁶ these women played an important role in the production and documentation of some church records and suggests, again their advanced literacy, familiarity with norms of shared governance, and deep engagement with Presbyterian theology.

These women became leaders, in part, because they enjoyed high socioeconomic standing that enabled them to devote time to concerns beyond their homes. Before and after the Civil War, white families benefited from Black labor. While slave schedules document this before emancipation, Jim Crow era censuses suggest the prevalence of domestic work as an occupation among Black women in predominantly white communities like Davidson. While we can’t know who worked in which home, we can logically infer that Black women performed domestic labor for their white neighbors here as they did elsewhere throughout the South. Notably, historians of Black women have emphasized that the lack of live-in Black servants in the post-war South reflects, in part, Black families’ preferences to have their own homes, families, private lives, and spaces apart from white people.⁷

"ladies missionary society meeting minutes" — Page from the Ladies Missionary Society Meeting Minutes

While white women were barred from formal power in sacred and professional settings, the unique role religion played in the lives of nineteenth-century Davidsonians enabled white women to take on leadership positions in the church while leaving the gendered and racialized hierarchies of power in their communities untouched. Through missionary societies in the Presbyterian church community, they were able to claim agency even within the marginalization they faced under the system of separate spheres; we must remember, however, that this is not the story of all women in Davidson. There are still immense gaps in the documentary record surrounding the activities and lives of women, specifically poor and Black women barred from whites-only organizations like the Ladies Missionary Society.

“She is a Hard Old Case”: Slave Owning Davidsonian Women

November 22, 2019 by elnagybenson@davidson.edu

E. Conklin, A. Kilby, E. Nagy-Benson, with I. Padalecki

In the Antebellum period, slavery played an integral role on plantations and in households near Davidson College. Although the college itself never owned slaves, prominent men associated with the institution did, including the third college president, Drury Lacy. In her letters preserved by the Davidson College Archives, Drury’s wife Mary described her relationship with the enslaved people in their household. These letters suggest that Mary relied on the labor of enslaved people to accomplish domestic tasks, raise her children, and host college guests. White women like Mary had a direct role in the institution of slavery. Therefore, an analysis of free white women’s relationships with enslaved Black women in their households can provide insights into gender, race, and power in early Davidson.

Experiences of White, Slave-Owning Women

In the mid-nineteenth century American South, privileged white women led lives centered around domesticity. According to the ideal of “separate spheres,” men and women were expected to occupy different spaces and positions in society. As historian Jeanne Boydston explains about nineteenth-century gender roles, “The contrast between Man and Woman melted easily into a contrast between workplace and home:” a wife was expected to create a domestic haven for her husband, who worked in the morally ambiguous public.¹ Through this “cult of domesticity,” nineteenth-century Americans idealized white feminine behavior as pious, pure, domestic, and submissive²

Mary performed these idealized gender norms as a white, Southern woman of means. Her letters show that her daily experiences revolved around child-rearing, cooking, and household management.³ At the same time, because Mary’s husband owned enslaved people, she relied on enslaved Black women to complete some domestic work. Because Black women and girls performed household labor and helped care for her children, Mary had time to devote attention to tasks like entertaining high-profile guests of Davidson College.⁴

This racialized division of labor reflected privilege and necessity. According to historian Catherine Clinton, mistresses depended on enslaved women’s knowledge and skill because “Southern women [of the slave-owning class] were seldom trained to keep the house.”⁵ Mary, whose father was a pastor at Princeton College, was raised in an affluent household and likely learned to manage others’ labor rather than complete unpleasant tasks herself.⁶ Mary made light of her limited skills, writing: “Fishburne⁷ says I am a ‘model housekeeper’ which tickled me vastly, as your Father says I am one of the poorest.”⁸ Her ability to force enslaved people to do the monotonous tasks of cleaning her family’s house and clothing and growing and preparing their food enabled her to live as a woman of status.

Letter from Mary Lacy to Bess from August 6, 1856. — Mary Lacy Letter, dated August 6, 1856.

Relations Between White and Enslaved Women

In addition to the housework they performed, enslaved Black women served as primary caregivers to their white mistresses’ children. One of the most common tropes in historical fiction is the “Mammy” figure, an older, matronly Black woman who cared for the plantation mistress and her children. Clinton objects to the “Mammy” figure, saying that it was “created by white Southerners to redeem the relationships between black women and white men within slave society.⁹ The nickname “Mammy” dehumanized enslaved women and suggested their willing participation in the forced labor of raising the children of their mistresses rather than their own. It also enabled slave owners, like the Lacys, who actively sought to buy a child from a nearby plantation, to deny their role in family separation.¹⁰

In a letter from August 6, 1856, Mary referred to two enslaved women, Amy and Maria, as “Aunt.” These familial terms obscure the true nature of their relationship. Mary’s language is laced with condescension, stating that she would like to leave home, but “Aunt Amy continues so sick” that she (Mary) had to take on more household labor. She suspects another slave, Maria, of faking illness to avoid working.¹¹ Historian Stephanie Camp explains that although enslaved people suffered from sickness and pain resulting from overwork, malnutrition, and a lack of medical care, enslaved women sometimes did rebel against their owners using one of the few safe methods available to them: feigning illness. These subtle acts disrupted households and asserted enslaved women’s humanity.¹²

Black and white image of Hezekiah Alexander's House, built in 1774. It is the oldest surviving structure in Mecklenburg County. — Hezekiah Alexander’s plantation home.

Notably, white women often claimed ownership of enslaved people. Because of coverture laws that legally subsumed wives to their husbands, married women could not independently own land until well into the nineteenth century. Widows retained a portion of the property for their use, but sons inherited their father’s land. For this reason, many fathers willed enslaved people to their daughters. In the will of Hezekiah Alexander of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, written in 1796, he gave his wife “two negro men named Sam and Abram.”¹³ In a will from the Castanea Grove plantation near Davidson, a husband chose not to will his wife enslaved people because “my wife has enough [enslaved people] of her own.”¹⁴ These documents demonstrate that privileged white women directly maintained the institution of slavery.

Page 1 of Castanea Grove Will — Will from Castanea Grove.

White Women and Discipline

Although we typically associate the disciplining of enslaved people with white men, white women learned to enforce power and control over enslaved people from youth, when slave-owning parents gifted enslaved people to young girls. Historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers notes, “young white girls came to realize very early on that they could own and control other human beings.”¹⁵ Trained to punish by their mothers, white women became the main source of discipline for enslaved people within the house.

According to the gendered and racialized hierarchy of slave-owning households, slave-owning women were submissive to their husbands yet violent towards enslaved people. Historian Thavolia Glymph argues that slave-owning women normally physically coerced and punished slaves.¹⁶ Because the main gendered role for wealthy, slave-owning white women was to serve as moral keeper of the household, they were also expected to discipline enslaved people who challenged patriarchal norms. This transformed the seemingly family-centered household into a violent space for enslaved women. Contrasting presentations of slave-owning women as charming belles in modern popular culture, primary sources from the Antebellum era described discipline by white women as violent and painful for the enslaved.¹⁷ Regarding a case in the town of Davidson wherein an enslaved man was suspected of a crime, Mary praised violence against enslaved people, hoping it would “strike terror into the negroes.”¹⁸ Mary’s status, like that of other slave-owning women, came at the expense of enslaved Black people.

Beginning in 2017, Davidson College began to publicly address its complicity with slavery and segregation. The Commission on Race and Slavery prompted interrogation of the college’s role in fostering white supremacy and enabling the exploitation of generations of Black people who worked for the college while denying others an education. The 2020 report acknowledged the role not just of college presidents, faculty, and students, but of the broader college community, including white women, in this. Documents from the college’s archives make clear the intersection between enslavement, white supremacy, and nineteenth-century gender roles, and although gender norms limited white women’s power in relationship to white men, enslavement normalized their ownership and coercion of Black people, particularly the women and girls who worked in their households.

Enslaved Women in Antebellum Davidson

November 22, 2019 by eomills@davidson.edu

E. Mills, M. McClelland, and E. Hudson, with I. Padalecki

Archives are not neutral spaces. They reflect the beliefs of those who established the institutions and created records they deemed worthy to save. Documents from the Antebellum era favor those who owned land and enslaved people. Enslaved women, in particular, make comparatively few appearances by name in most records from this period. This includes those kept by Davidson College, specifically its faculty and trustees. While this makes researching and writing about enslaved women challenging, learning about their experiences and their impact on the college is possible. The irony is that the references we do have tell us that enslaved women’s presence was ubiquitous and their labor essential. Using innovative methods and informed by Black feminist theory, we can gan insight into the lives of enslaved women from plantations around the college and households within town and understand how enslaved women in both of these settings interacted with the school.

Plantation, College, and Archival Silences

Records kept by the college document by name the sons of planters that enrolled and provide some insight into routine interaction between the college and neighboring plantations. Still, we know less about the region surrounding Davidson than we do about other regions of the South. In his article about slavery in the North Carolina Piedmont, historian John David Smith writes in reference to this documentary gap, “part of the explanation for the lack of knowledge about the Piedmont and slavery results from the relative paucity of information pertaining to it in secondary accounts.”¹ For this reason, historians of slavery rely heavily on a wide range of primary sources and secondary sources to make comparisons to areas more thoroughly studied. Trustee minutes, for example, reveal that slave owning trustees were compensated by the college for labor enslaved people performed on campus. They do not document the names of the enslaved people as they do the names of those educated here whose families owned other human beings, nor do they tell us in detail what kind of labor enslaved people performed. The more thorough documentary records at other Southern colleges and universities suggest that enslaved people performed routine domestic labor, including cleaning and heating buildings, and grounds maintenance around the campus, but they also performed specialized labor involved with construction and the actual physical growth of the campus.² In July 2018, when a descendent of Betty Davidson Tate, a woman enslaved on a nearby plantation, contacted the college because their family had kept a story about her role “helping to build the college,” an archivist confirmed that the college had purchased bricks handmade at a nearby plantation for construction of early buildings.³ The college still has a record of that payment although no list of who did the work; now, however, because of that phone call, we now know the name of Betty Davidson Tate.

Although no one document held in the Davidson College Archives tells about the lives of enslaved women in detail, we can learn about general patterns by considering primary sources together. For example, take the map of the plantations around Davidson compiled by historian and archivist Chalmers Davidson. At first glance, we find no mention of the enslaved people who lived and worked at this site. If we cross-reference this map with the slave schedules, or censuses, created by the US government in 1850 and 1860, we can learn how many enslaved people lived at each plantation and some basic demographic information about them: their gender, their age, and their ancestry– Black or mulatto, meaning mixed. Tellingly, these records also do not identify enslaved people by their names. For example, nineteen of the thirty three people enslaved by William Lee Davidson, Jr, one of the founders of Davidson College, were female. They ranged in age from sixty-five to one year old. The majority are identified as Black, but the color of two women, a twenty-two-year old and a twenty-four-year old, is coded as mulatto.⁴

Because they were considered the property of their owners, enslaved women could not refuse to have sex with planters, their sons, or white men who oversaw their labor. The widespread experience of sexual abuse in slavery was well-documented at the time by abolitionists and critics of the institution and remains a painful theme in the oral histories and family stories of many Black Americans. Considered together — this map, the slave schedule, and our general understanding of women’s experiences of enslavement — we can make logical conclusions about what enslaved women in and around Davidson would have experienced. That included sexual violence.⁵

Map depicting 28 locations relevant to plantation life around Davidson in the Antebellum period

Southern plantations were sites of racialized and gendered violence, and while historical scholarship has thoroughly documented the normalized brutality enacted by slave-owning men, more recent scholarship by historians of women has demonstrated how white women participated in the system of enslavement as well. While some historical narratives attempt to depict white women and enslaved women as equals in experiencing gendered oppression, this was not the case. White women often were responsible for physical violence perpetrated against enslaved women because of proximity to them and responsibility for household labor. According to historian Thavolia Glymph, “White women…owned slaves and managed households in which they held the power of…life and death…”⁶ Southern white women on plantations were responsible for their separate sphere of domesticity, the “women’s work” in the household that was seen as distinct from men’s work in the public sphere.⁷ Likewise, white women did not perform much of the hard labor required to keep a household running. Enslaved women did this work and faced severe, violent punishment if their white mistresses were not satisfied. The idealized, pious, and pure domestic sphere did not extend to enslaved women, who performed the same hard labor as enslaved men as well as the emotional, domestic labor often attributed to white mothers. Understanding gendered and racialized norms of behavior within antebellum slavery, we can work toward a more nuanced understanding of plantation life around Davidson.

Black Women’s Emotional Labor in the Domestic Sphere

One document held by the Davidson College Archives does speak to the humanity of a local enslaved woman. The emotional labor associated with caregiving performed by enslaved women in Davidson is especially evident in the story of a woman named Cynthia. The family of Franklin Brevard McDowell (class of 1869) claimed ownership of Cynthia, who lived on the Brevard Plantation, which was located near Davidson College. As an adult, McDowell wrote about Cynthia, who he describes as his ‘nurse’. According to historians Emily West and R.J. Knight, the term ‘nurse’ was often used to describe both enslaved wet nurses, women who breastfed the children of white slave-owners, and general caretakers of young children.⁸ Cynthia could have been either or both. West and Knight describe the expectation of enslaved women to act as wet-nurses as “a system of dual exploitation of enslaved women’s bodies as both reproducers and as workers.⁹ Therefore, it is possible that the McDowells exploited Cynthia for both her reproductive and physical labor. White slave-owning parents forced enslaved women to feed owners’ babies instead of their own, a violent theft of bodily autonomy normalized by white supremacy.¹⁰

The first part of the letter Franklin Brevard McDowell wrote describing Cynthia as his nurse.

The second part of the letter Franklin Brevard McDowell wrote describing Cynthia as his nurse. — Letter from James Brevard McDowell about Cynthia

At the same time, McDowell’s reminiscences reveal a girl or woman who had loved ones of her own. We know her father’s name was Nero. She also had a sense of humor and teased the young boy about his being a foundling she saved from a hawk — a joke that inverted the power dynamics between her and the boy’s parents. If Cynthia found the boy, she was his, not the other way around. McDowell’s memories also hint at Cynthia’s agency is finding respite from the plantation and physical distance from its hardships by taking her young charge into the woods. In her study of enslaved women, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, historian Stephanie Camp emphasized that the forests surrounding plantations often were safe spaces for enslaved women. They would sometimes run away into the woods to rob their owners of their labor. ¹¹ Camp argues that the economic impact of these minor acts of truancy was cumulative, and through them enslaved people reclaimed time, labor, and bodily autonomy. Seemingly unaware of the irony in his recollections, McDowell gives us a glimpse of how Cynthia carved out space to briefly feel freedom from bondage.

Who’s in the Kitchen?: Gender & Culinary Labor

November 22, 2019 by adturner@davidson.edu

A. Turner and T. Bohannon, with I. Padalecki

Davidson College’s official history emphasizes the contributions of early trustees, presidents, and faculty in establishing the college, but neglects those of women. Although excluded as students and denied employment as faculty, women worked all over campus, particularly cleaning and preparing food for students, faculty, and staff. By analyzing U.S. census data, letters, and diaries left by women who lived on or near campus, historians can imagine what free and enslaved women’s culinary work might have looked like in nineteenth-century Davidson.

Food in Early Davidson

While North Carolina plantations and farms mass-produced food like corn and pork for sale at markets, most people, white and Black, produced some of their own food. Residents of small towns like Davidson grew vegetables and raised livestock in their own yards.¹ In her diary, Ellie M. Andrews, a white woman from nearby Statesville, discussed her family’s vegetable and poultry production.² The prices of poultry, eggs, and butter were high at the time, and gardening saved Ellie and her family money. Likewise, Mary Lacy, the wife of the third Davidson College president, Drury Lacy, wrote about the family’s garden in a letter to her stepdaughter, Bess: “How does your garden grow? The sun & drought has ruined our melons…of late they are only fit to feed the pigs.”³ It is unclear how large their garden was, but Mary and the family’s slaves, who probably performed much of this labor as was custom in the Antebellum South, grew vegetables and fruit to feed household members and guests of the college.⁴ Enslaved people in Davidson also sometimes had their own small plots of land on which to grow food in order to supplement their diets⁵

" " — Ellie’s Journal transcribed and published. On her entry from Wednesday the 10th, she describes her garden and the money it saves her.

Davidson residents also purchased food at local stores. A white woman who lived in Davidson in the 1870s explained that “there was no market, one or two small groceries supplied heavier items of food, but for eggs, butter, chicken…the housewives depended on the country people in the vicinity.”⁶ Consequently, Davidson residents enjoyed far fewer culinary choices compared to those who lived in larger cities, like nearby Charlotte.

In another letter to Bess, Mary Lacy inquired about prices of lemons and sugar in Charlotte. ⁷ Introduced into the Anglo culinary world during the colonial era, cooks used acidic lemons to season and preserve food. While the Spanish extended lemon cultivation into the Americas (specifically in Florida), enslaved people throughout the Caribbean produced sugar, a major cash crop. By the nineteenth century, both lemons and refined sugar were staples of the Anglo-American diet in the South. Prosperous families like the Lacys enjoyed lemon sauces, preserves, and, of course, lemonade. Lemonade, in particular, grew in popularity during the mid-nineteenth century among those who advocated for temperance, or abstaining from alcohol consumption for moral reasons. This included Presbyterians like the Lacys.⁸ It’s possible that Mary sought lemons and sugar for lemonade for a campus event. It is also notable that she expected Bess to help her shop; nineteenth-century women commonly performed domestic labor, including shopping, for family members and friends who lived in separate households. Women’s networks of shared labor were an important social and economic support and ones that sustained the college.

" " — This article, an interview from a woman (name unknown) who lived in Davidson in the 1870s, describes the different grocery stores in town.

Food Production and Enslavement

Enslaved women grew and prepared food for Antebellum slave-owning households and for white Southerners, regardless of whether or not they owned slaves. Slave-owning whites who created the documentary record normalized this racialized and gendered division of labor. Because they believed this work to be an enslaved woman’s God-given role, they did not explain it or comment on it except when noting the value of that labor as crops grown or meals consumed. Slave owners rarely characterized enslaved women as essential or skilled laborers although their work sustained households and communities. As a result, many records created by those nourished by enslaved women render those very women invisible. We know everyone in the Antebellum South had to eat, but most primary sources only give us glimpses of the women who prepared that food.

Through an analysis of oral histories with Southern white people who were children before the Civil War, historian David Anderson found that many romanticized the enslaved Black women who cooked for them. They saw these enslaved women as maternal figures who loved cooking for them rather than human beings coerced into forced labor that often subjected them to surveillance and punishment by their mistresses and isolated them from other enslaved people.⁹ Whites raised in slave-owning households fondly remembered enslaved cooks, but they failed to recognize and acknowledge both the violence these women endured and the skills they possessed.¹⁰

In the nineteenth century, free and enslaved women’s kitchen work was undervalued because it was associated with the uncompensated labor of maintaining the home rather than the economic development and growth of commercial markets. This was true even in cases involving clear exchanges of currency for food, such as when students paid for prepared meals at local eating and boarding houses.¹¹ Rather than cooking their own meals or eating in a common cafeteria, students dined on campus at Steward’s Hall and at off-campus boarding houses.¹² Data from the 1860 U.S. Federal Census shows that local boarding house owners in Davidson held enslaved women who presumably performed domestic labor benefitting members of the college community. Census takers did not record the names of these women. Did students know them by name? We wonder but cannot know if Davidson College students who interacted with them on a daily basis would have related to them as they did to enslaved cooks back home.¹³

" " — The U.S. Census record of 1860. The enslaved people J.H. Maxwell claimed owernship of are listed on this page.

While they did not acknowledge the economic value of enslaved women’s work, slave owners depended on it for their survival as they lacked the necessary skills or were unwilling to perform this labor themselves. In another diary entry, Ellie M. Andrews complained about having to hire a Black cook: “Today I have hired a cook for the enormous sum of $120.00 and clothe her….[Black people] never were known to hire so high.”¹⁴ Andrews’ entry demonstrates that white Southerners both diminished and depended upon the domestic labor of Black women. As Black women entered the wage labor market, their newfound freedom — including to negotiate reasonable wages and safe working conditions — proved threatening to their white counterparts. ¹⁵ However, as much as women like Andrews disliked fairly compensating a Black woman for her work, she and other white women like her depended on this labor to manage their households.¹⁶

By investigating the history of food preparation in nineteenth-century Davidson, we gain insight into power relations among members of the campus community and the gendered and racialized value system of those who created the documents in our archives. While students, faculty, and staff ate multiple meals each day, women’s work preparing, serving, and cleaning up after those meals was largely ignored as unimportant. When we think today about who prepares our food and how food service enable everything else we do from our normal routine of classes to our celebrations marked by special dinners, we should pause and ask what kind of records we are creating that document the important work of nourishing the college community and the conditions in which our food service staff do these essential jobs.