What did it mean to be a white female in the eighteenth-century South? This dissertation proposes an answer to this question by using the most widely circulated prescriptive literature (sermons, conduct-of-life advice, newspaper essays, and novels) for women and examining the ways in which women responded to it. In an age in which the focus of female education was identity rather than vocational training, this burgeoning literature was fraught with meaning for women, for it was the source of their understanding of themselves and how they should live their lives. This project shows how women were selective consumers of the literature they read: accepting some ideas, rejecting others, and ultimately constructing their own codes of conduct. It is a difficult problem to discern women's reading of the advice, since very few women identified their reading or left behind analyses of it. Using familiar sources such as inventories, wills, accounts, church records, letters, and diaries in creative ways, however, it is possible to perceive ways that women's reading figured in their lives.;Self-effacing postures, even with other women, show the expected influence of traditional advice; but the example of alternate behavior such as that of two young women who refused to shun a friend disgraced by her seduction by a French officer reveals a complexity to women's behavior that the prescriptive literature never does. In the convergence of religious and secular prescriptive literature by the end of the century, women found the warrant to create as they became producers rather than merely consumers of advice literature, and in so doing, formulated their own model of femininity.

Yankee peddlers were ubiquitous in the countryside and in the imagination of the Old South. Social and economic forces pushed young men off the farms of rural New England and pulled them into an expanding, national market. The shortage of land for a burgeoning population spurred the exodus from the countryside, while the lure of profits from a vocation with low entry costs attracted many young men who preferred seeking the main chance in the commercial marketplace to a state of protracted dependency as a farm hand, a factory operative, or an outwork producer. Hired by firms to peddle clocks, tinware, and other "notions," their experiences in the marketplace transmogrified these deracinated New England farm boys into sharp, itinerant traders. In the course of this transformation, these migrant workers from New England were indelibly marked by the culture in which they were raised, even as they moved away from familiar values to embrace an emerging market creed.;The thousands of young men from New England who peddled in the South between 1800 and 1860 provided rural southern households direct access to consumer goods. They joined native southern petty merchandisers---hucksters, cake bakers, watermen and groggery keepers---in an interracial, face-to-face economy whose actions threatened the fixed ranks and organic hierarchy of slave society. The Yankee peddler gradually became a more threatening figure to southern planters. Antebellum southern sensibilities towards northern society and market institutions evolved from Southerners' real and fictionalized encounters with Yankee peddlers. Virginia planters hated debt, even as they continued to consume goods they could not afford, and rather than fault themselves for high living, they blamed the agents of consumer desire---Yankee peddlers---for conspiring with women and enslaved dependents to undermine their authority and worsen their economic plight. Southern caricatures of the Yankee peddler put a face on the impersonal forces of the national marketplace that intruded into traditional exchange networks. The fictive Yankee peddler's violation of the southern home elucidates the apprehensions antebellum southern society experienced as it was integrated into the national market and edged towards secession.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.