REVIEWS 207 tions in the Jim Crow South intolerable. Moreover, Weiner often seems intent on presenting the best possible portrait of white women's behavior. In doing so, she does not always examine the unseemly side of their motives. Plantation women understood that paternalism was an exchange relationship. In return for their favors, these women expected even greater subservience and loyalty from their servants. Finally, Weiner does not always explore the complex responses that black women had toward white women's benevolent overtures. For example, Weiner suggests that one way in which white women demonstrated their emotional identification with black women was by doting on their children. One wonders if black women welcomed this attention or if they interpreted such behavior as an affront to their child-rearing skills and a threat to the autonomy of their families.r Weiner might have better demonstrated the close bond that black and white women created with one another by comparing these women's relationships with some of the other relationships that developed on the plantation-masters and black women or mistresses and male slaves. Unfortunately, Weiner's portrayal of men, especially white men, is rather flat so the comparative perspective is never adequately developed.These criticisms aside, Weiner's book is worth reading. She provides an original and provocative presentation of plantation women in the mid-nineteenth century--one that is sure to stimulate debate. Equally important, Weiner provides one of the most detailed analyses of the South's ideology of domesticity and she helps us to understand female agency in the shifting nature of Southern race relations. For these reasons, Mistresses and Slaves is a noteworthy contribution to the growing body of literature on nineteenth-century Southern women.
France's first written constitution, adopted by the French National Assembly on September 3, 1791, made freedom of movement a basic right of French citizenship. The repercussions of this intervention, as with other aspects of France's revolution in basic human rights, would ultimately extend throughout the Western world and beyond. In the immediate revolutionary context, however, recent scholarship reveals how this revolutionary act served as a catalyst for the growth and elaboration of
ancien régime
migratory patterns, even as the revolutionary decade generated thousands of refugees and disrupted a number of long‐standing local, regional, and colonial migratory streams.
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