White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

by Martha Hodes

Book Overview

"[A] fascinating survey of interracial relationships in the South between the 1680s and the 1880s. . . . Enthralling."--David Nicholson, Washington Post

This award-winning book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300077505
• ISBN13: 9780300077506
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Scandalously Good Book

This is a scandalously good and honest book; well researched and successful in pulling back the scab on one of the many important subterranean areas of southern America's lurid but very active cross-racial sexual life. Most of America's social history remains tucked away in various nooks and crannies of our collective repressed minds. While the evidence is everywhere (the large numbers of American mulattoes and the fact that half of all American blacks and Native Americans have some white blood and rather incredibly about 30% of all whites have some black blood: How did it get that way? -- not through the White woman-Black man route, for sure. There is a great deal to chew on here. Among others, it puts to rest the old myth of the wild black buck rapist. Many, if not most of the blacks lynched for rape were certifiably engaged in love affairs discovered and exposed too soon, with predictable consequences: The black man usually ended up paying the ultimate price to protect the reputation of his white female lover. But in many such instances the woman refused to take the "he raped me defense" and openly declared her love for her illicit black mate, and as a result, also suffered the inevitable consequences -effective expulsion from the white race. When the other half of this sordid story comes to the fore - the "goings-on in the dark" between white men and black women -- only then can we truly say that America is coming of age. Five stars

ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST TABOOS

THis Book is Very Well DOcumented & Done.Unlike THe Media at large Today or on a Bigger Scale Hollywood who still is stuck in The GUess Whose Coming To DInner Phase Of Life? Martha Hodges Brings Too Life The Fact that WHite WOmen & Black Men have Gotten Together during Slavery & After The Civil War.Books Like this are Very Important Because if You Go By TV it's Usually Watered Down or Down in Token Form.ALot OF Respect TOO Martha Hodges FOr Bringing This Book To Light.

An excellent book

This is the best book I have read on this subject. I highly recommend it