Marie Jenkins Schwartz is professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island. She is also the author of Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South and Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South.
"In Ties That Bound, Schwartz provides a necessary corrective to
the popular and scholarly literature on the First Ladies, accounts
that tend to focus on their roles as fashionable hostesses. In this
fascinating study, Schwartz shows how deeply slavery was embedded
in the Founders' households and explores in exquisite detail the
fraught relationships between these Patriot mistresses and the men
and women and adults and children whose labor they commanded. A
lively and insightful book that complements--and at times
contradicts--works glorifying the Founding Fathers and their wives
and (white) daughters."--Jacqueline Jones, author of A Dreadful
Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's
America
"Many books have been written about America's First Ladies over the
last several decades, but for the most part they have addressed
only tangentially the issue of slavery. In Ties that Bound:
Founding First Ladies and Slaves, historian Marie Jenkins
Schwartz
corrects that significant omission. . . . Schwartz is a fluid
writer who provides rich details about the daily lives of this
group of Founding First Ladies and the enslaved people who made
their privileged lifestyles possible and with whom they interacted
on a daily basis. . . . The book is a solid synthesis that enlarges
our understanding of gender, class, race, and the institution of
slavery in the early republic."-- "North Carolina Historical
Review"
"Ties That Bound provides enlightening depictions of both the savvy
that aristocratic women utilized to achieve as much power as their
husbands did (even though it was a different kind of power), as
well as the disheartening distractions from self-empowerment that
these women had to negotiate. . .Schwartz's expertise clearly
shines when she is analyzing the various ways that both black
female slaves and white female aristocrats negotiated the man's
world of early nineteenth-century America. . . .A fine and worthy
contribution to intersectional studies."-- "H-Net"
"Ties That Bound's most important contribution is refocusing our
attention on First Ladies as slaveholders and revealing how
slaveholding influenced their roles. . . .This book deserves a wide
readership."-- "Journal of Southern History"
"Absorbing. . . . The story of the Founders and slavery is one of
the most vexed in American history, analyzed and debated generation
after generation. Ties That Bound doesn't unravel the moral or
sociological underpinnings and consequences of those tangled
connections, but it does contribute a fresh and valuable dimension
to that long argument with its fine-grained portraits of domestic
life in the South in the early republic."-- "New York Review of
Books"
"An inventive, integrated portrait of black and white. . . . Her
fierce research is distilled into engaging prose. . . . Secrets and
lies ensnared these braided lives, and Ties That Bound offers vivid
insight into these entangled stories."-- "Times Higher Education"
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