ABSTRACT
Joan E. Cashin’s A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier is the first book-length study of the important migration of slaveowners to the old Southwest. Her focus on the family dynamics of the migration opens many angles of vision on planter family life. In the excerpt reprinted here, Cashin discusses the conflicts that arose between men and women as the decision to migrate was reached. Earlier in the chapter, she argues that a major motivation behind migration was a “search for manly independence.” Here she shows how most women—wives, sisters, mothers—opposed and dreaded migration. Their opposition generally carried no weight in the families she studies, and the picture that emerges of planter marriages is more one of conflict and unwelcome subordination for women than is evident in Fox-Genovese’s interpretation.
