Southern Single Blessedness

In this engaging study, Christine Jacobson Carter uncovers the fruitful and interesting lives of single women--and the attitudes toward them--in the bustling urban centers of nineteenth-century Savannah and Charleston. Carter's focus is on educated, financially secure white women who joined in the culture's celebration of domesticity even though they had not married. Making effective use of contemporary fiction, advice literature, diaries, and letters to, from, and about single women, Carter shows that such women valued independence and female friendships and were in turn valued for family and community service. She also explores their attitudes toward personal fulfillment, the relationships that sustained (and sometimes tormented) them, and the impact of the Civil War as well as the southern and urban aspects of their public and private identities.''A fascinating and revealing glimpse into the heretofore unexamined lives of antebellum and Civil War era unmarried women. . . . Historians and general readers alike will find Southern Single Blessedness both interesting and worthwhile. . . . A lively and enjoyable read.''--Southern Historian ''Carter argues for [southern spinsters'] centrality as 'the glue' that kept 'elite social networks as well as individual families intact.' They were the 'communicators, caretakers, surrogate mothers, family servants, and benevolent women extending feminine virtues to individuals and organizations,' holding kith and kin, and community together. . . And she does so in graceful prose, with strikingly etched portraits of fascinating individuals.''--American Historical Review