Date of Award
5-2010
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Program
History
Department
History
Major Professor
Mitchell, Mary N.
Second Advisor
Atkinson, Connie
Third Advisor
Powers, Madelon
Abstract
This thesis examines cultivation in the lives of Sarah and Columbia Bennett between the years 1852 and 1874. The Bennett women's letters convey an intimate sense of the agro-economic preoccupations (and gardening pleasures) of these slave-owning white women, and the centrality of cultivation in mid-nineteenth-century rural Louisiana within a landscape of country stores, plantations, and people. As the lives of the Bennett women illustrate, white women's gardening knowledge and practice formed a cornerstone of central Louisiana society. The Bennett women's gardening knowledge and skill were primary components in the creation of a self-sustaining plantation household. By cultivating produce and other foodstuffs for consumption, the Bennett women made possible the family's participation in the lucrative market for cotton and other cash crops, a market that also tied their household to plantation economies elsewhere in the transatlantic world.
Recommended Citation
Swindler, Erin, ""I Have Told You about the Cane and Garden": White Women, Cultivation, and Southern Society in Central Louisiana, 1852-1874" (2010). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1182.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1182
Rights
The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.