Journal of the Early Republic

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Susanna Delfino has written a concise and insightful book that maps the life of Susanna (Susan) Preston Shelby Grigsby (1830–1891) within the context of broad economic and social changes in both the state of Kentucky and the wider United States of America. Written in eloquent, enthusiastic, and passionate prose, Delfino seeks to illuminate many complexities in the lives of white women enslavers as they strove to adjust to a modernizing world and their new, often reduced status within it, especially by the postbellum era. At one level Bonds of Womanhood reads very much like a conventional, traditional biography. However, the book achieves much more than this through Delfino's impressive research at the intersection of her interests in both white women's biography and more macro patterns of economic and social change. Hence the author offers an innovative approach to writing biographically within a wider, more contextualized format.

The book is conventionally structured chronologically, beginning with more standard biographical descriptions of the histories of the Shelby and Hart families and their move from South Wales to British North America, where they eventually settled in Kentucky. Later chapters intertwine key themes that include Grigsby's early life and subsequent marriage, the economic and social transformation of Kentucky itself, the bonds between white women, their relationships with the enslaved and opinions of the institution, and the subsequent upheaval of the Civil War. A coda tracks Grigsby's experiences of being a working woman in postbellum Washington, DC.

Delfino is aware of key recent historiography about the nature of relationships between enslaved women and the white women who held them in bondage, including important works by Thavolia Glymph and Stephanie Jones-Rogers: Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, UK, 2008) and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT, 2019), respectively. Yet the author pushes back a little on characterizations of white women as purely exploitative, at least in the case of Susan Grigsby. Delfino argues that Grigsby herself remained highly conflicted about slavery for much of her life. For example, she readily hired out enslaved children (and sometimes adult men) and espoused characteristically racist views about the enslaved. Delfino argues Grigsby strove to be a "conscientious" enslaver (77) according to the norms of the time, and her characterization of Grigsby as a woman who practiced merely in "theoretical sympathising" (103) with the enslaved is conceptually highly useful. [End Page 520]

Methodologically the book utilizes a range of evidence both from and about Grigsby, including her personal testimony and other papers from prominent enslaving families. Delfino likewise includes more traditional evidence such as court records, newspapers, and the census to illuminate both Grigsby's life and the wider societal changes she lived through. In keeping with recent trends, there is some speculation about Grigsby's feelings and emotions, especially in her romantic affections toward her spouse, John Warren Grigsby, and her mother, Virginia Hart Shelby (later Breckinridge) with whom Grigsby remained close. The theme of loss resonates poignantly throughout this work, especially intimate family members such as parents, siblings, and particularly children, many of whom died in tragic circumstances.

There is less hypothesizing about Grigsby's relationships with enslaved women. However, in considering that the book includes the word slavery in its title, more probing of the nature of Susan Grigsby's relationships with enslaved women would have been useful, especially since much of women's lives, whether free or enslaved, revolved around domestic spaces. Yet enslaved women are only infrequently mentioned by name (particularly in reference to issues of sexual violence in other enslaving households), and Delfino devotes more attention to Grigsby's quest to employ a white woman domestic within her own home. Delfino suggests Grigsby may have sought white help because of her inner conflicts over slavery, but the fact that she also chose not to employ Catholics suggests racism played a role here too.

In considering Grigsby's quest for white domestics, Delfino draws upon a pioneering article by Stephanie Cole about white nurses in the border states: "A White Woman, of Middle Age, Would Be Preferred: Children's Nurses in the Old South," in Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South, edited by Michele Gillespie, and Susanna Delfino (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), 75–101. The author devotes much of the later chapters of the book to Grigsby's efforts to find a white nurse, efforts that repeatedly failed. However, the precise labor Grigsby wanted her white "nurse" to perform could have been elaborated upon. The term nurse itself is amorphous and ambiguous, denoting caring in many different ways, including wet nursing, caring for the young and the sick, and sometimes the elderly as well. Delfino could have engaged more with recent works on mothering and the labor of caring, for example Sarah Knott and Emma Griffin's edited collection "Theorizing and Historicizing Mothering's Many Labors," Past & Present 246 (Dec. 2020), which includes [End Page 521] examples of different forms of mothering and caring within Atlantic slave regimes. Overall, the author's heart seems to lie less in the intimate and contested domestic spaces of plantations and more in explaining the wider economic and social changes impacting Kentucky over the course of the nineteenth century, especially the 1850s.

Delfino raises the question of Grigsby's typicality at the outset, and throughout the book she makes comparisons between her life and those of other enslaving women, including, for example, Sarah Gibson, the sister of her first cousin Randall Lee Gibson, as well as Keziah Brevard in South Carolina and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas in Georgia. And while the point is not made explicitly, the conclusion suggests that the life course of Grigsby, a woman with complicated and sometimes conflicting beliefs, who journeyed from being an "aristocrat" (a term worthy of deeper consideration here) to a member of the middle class, was rather typical of those in her milieu. It will be of interest to people wanting to know more about the specific history of Kentucky as well as those wanting to add depth to their understanding of southern white women's lives in the nineteenth century.