The world of the working woman in the old South of the USA has been largely neglected by historians. This text pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labours of ordinary southern women - white, free black and Indian. Contributors to this volume illuminate women's involvement in the southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays explore the working lives of a wide range of women - nuns and prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic servants - in urban and rural settings across the antebellum South. By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially acknowledged and ""invisible"" work within the context of cultural attitudes regarding women's proper place in society, the book sheds light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race, class and gender in the modernising South.

Susanna Delfino is senior researcher and professor of American history at the University of Genoa in Italy.|Michele Gillespie is associate professor of history at Wake Forest University