"I Have Told You about the Cane and Garden": White Women, Cultivation, and Southern Society in Central Louisiana, 1852-1874

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Year

2010

Author dc:creator

• Swindler, Erin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mitchell, Mary N.
• Atkinson, Connie
• Powers, Madelon

• Sarah Bennett
• Ezra Bennett
• Columbia Bennett
• rural
• Louisiana
• Rapides Parish
• Avoyelles Parish
• cultivation
• gardens
• gardening
• cash crops
• sugar cane
• cotton
• filibustering
• Cuba
• slavery
• women
• transatlantic

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1182

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-2165