Virginia Cary and the Others:

A Post-Structuralist Analysis Highlighting Religious Othering in the Writings of Virginia Randolph Cary By Matt Cromwell HIST 630 with Professor Eve Kornfeld December 8, 2011

Emma invited Virginia Cary to her home as a guest to be introduced to Emmas seventeen year old foster-daughter Emilia. The slaves had cleaned the dining table and room and prepared the living room for evening family worship. Mrs. Cary thought it remarkable how attentive and crisply dressed the slaves were. When asked about them, daughter Emilia tells Mrs. Cary that when we teach our servants to serve God they serve us of course, for obedience to their earthly master is one branch of their duty to their heavenly King. Mrs. Cary would later learn that many considered Emmas servants to be the best behaved in the country. Mrs. Virginia Cary wrote down this episode in a series of letters to a young woman named Mary. It is unclear whether Mary was a real young lady or just a medium for Mrs. Cary to get her thoughts out. Either way Letters on Female Character was Mrs. Cary attempt to influence the Virginian concept of the role of women and mothers in society. Religious thought and practice is most often conceived of as an intimately personal thing. This is one reason why the framers of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution established the free exercise of religion and expression. For many, that amendment is foundational to what it means to be a free citizen in the United States. Students of religious history also recognize the extreme costs the U.S. has expended in extending and protecting that freedom. Religious freedom allowed white Southerners to use their Christian interpretations of

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the Bible to justify slavery of African Americans. Of course, white Northerners interpreted the Bible differently. That is the simplistic narrative of Antebellum America that most are familiar with. But this narrative provokes immediate questions in its language alone. By calling them Southerners and Northerners we otherize them from ourselves thus flattening the details of who they were. We liken them more to sports teams; the Northern Blues and the Southern Greys; rather than to families with children. Children tend to complicate reality. In this case, it is hard for our modern minds to comprehend how white Southern parents would teach their children religious and moral truths based on Christianity justifying and even glorifying slavery. In this essay, I will highlight family religious teaching through the particular lens of Virginia Randolph Cary. We will explore the ways in which she understands her society as an ordered hierarchy. We will see how she otherizes worldly men and women, servants, and even women themselves. Summarily, I will argue that Cary, as part of the declining white gentry elite of Virginian society, sought to use her dwindling influence to mold and shape the role of the Virginian woman and mother according to her religious ideals. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF VIRGINIA RANDOLPH CARY Virginia Randolph Cary belonged to what historian Cynthia Kierner calls the class of decaying gentry of the Virginia plantation society.1 The Randolph family was very influential in post-revolutionary Virginia. In 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux commented that when travelling in Virginia, you must be prepared to hear the name of Randolph frequently

Kierner, Cynthia "The Dark and Dense Cloud Perpetually Lowering over Us": Gender and the Decline of the Gentry in Postrevolutionary Virginia. I lean heavily on this work for the major details of the Randolph and Cary families and lifestyles. Virginia Cary and the Others Matt Cromwell Page 2 of 17 Thursday, December 8, 2011

mentioned, because this was one of the first families of the country but it is also one of the most numerous and wealthiest (Chatellux). This significance, though, was slowly and steadily decreasing. The upheavals of war, falling tobacco prices, and emerging politics of the newly established country all impacted negatively on the financial security of southern plantation owners. Virginia Randolph was the youngest of 13 children to Thomas Mann Randolph and Anne Cary Randolph, wealthy tobacco plantation owners. In an effort to maintain their family clout and wealth, Virginia married her cousin the great nephew of President Thomas Jefferson, Wilson Jefferson Cary, a slave-trader. Despite her family wealth, and Mr. Carys lucrative profession, Virginia was left very poor after her husbands death. Each of her siblings, both the men and women, suffered similar financial ruin by the end of their lives. Though they were each considered ladies or gentlemen in their time, by the end, they had each known what hunger was, and the difficulty of securing honest labor. The Randolph family legacy was a prime example of the declining financial state of the Virginian plantations before the Civil War. In the same year Cary lost her husband, her home was also destroyed by fire. In her poverty and in the depths of so much loss she wrote Letters on Female Character: Addressed to a Young Lady on the Death of Her Mother. It is a collection of thirty letters, each addressed only to Mary. The topics range from modesty in fashion choices, to spiritual practices, to the management of servants. The following year she published Christian Parents Assistant: or Tales, for the Moral and Religious Instruction of Youth. This work is a series of fictionalized stories, strongly resembling typical families and individuals in Carys surrounding, each of which illustrate the negative consequences of not adhering to some of Carys favorite religious colloquial teachings. Both of these works are considered advice books. As a member of the
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elite of southern Virginian society it is no wonder that books published by Mrs. Cary would be considered socially authoritative, particularly for women, despite her recent financial despair. In this way, the moral and religious models that Cary writes on are examples of what southern women would aspire to be themselves. Of course the reality and the ideal are entirely different. Cary is fully aware of that difference. It is in that difference that she finds her vocation, where she sees her power being most effective. Keirner asserts that both Virginia, and her oldest sister Mary who wrote The Virginian House-Wife sought to define the roles and responsibilities of elite and middling southern women. In particular, each sister articulated what she believed to be the proper response of Virginian women to the protracted crisis experienced by the Randolphs and other gentry families in the postrevolutionary era (Kierner). With this understanding of Virginia Carys person and background, we can now analyze the various ways in which she Otherises those in her society. Some questions will recur, for example: Why is her identity as a devout Christian seemingly so dependent on her difference from virtually all others? What is left of her identity when so few emulate her own aspirations? AN ADMONISHED OTHERING Othering Nominal Christians, Worldly People, and Christians of Other Denominations In historian Eve Kornfelds analysis of colonial America and its Othering of Native Americans, she says that in periods of uncertainty or crisis the identities or subjectivities of individuals within a dominant social group are constructed in opposition to a culturally different Other. One primary way that Virginia Cary shapes the identity of Virginian women is by admonishing those who do not act particularly virtuous by her standards of piety and propriety. Through her writing she makes negative examples of women she wants to Otherise. I call this an
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admonished Othering for the way in which she simultaneously separates herself from these subjects and admonishes their behavior as being below their moral or religious capacity. As opposed to servants who have a limited moral capacity (as we will explore later), respectable women should know better, have access to proper education and training, and yet many (according to Cary) still behave below their moral standing. There are three groups of people that fit this category: those she calls nominal Christians, worldly men and women, and Christians of denominations that she adamantly disagrees with. NOMINAL CHRISTIANS Virginia Cary describes nominal Christians as those who ascribe to a loose understanding of the historical account of Jesus, but do not adhere strongly to the principles of the faith. As an evangelical, her spiritual barometer lies within whether a persons heart is transformed, which is evident by their behavior; both public and private. As a Presbyterian, she believes in the doctrine of total depravity, which is that human nature is completely corrupt to its core, irredeemable except by the unmerited grace and mercy of God. According to Cary, Christianity can be based on no other doctrine (Cary Letters, 18). Nominal Christians then, are those who do not reflect an transformation of their hearts because they believe that they have some element of good inside them that merits their worth before God. They may read their Bibles, and attend the ordinances of religion but their unchanged hearts are full to overflowing of worldly conceits and affections (Cary Letters, 60). The difficulty with this kind of Othering is that it is so subjective, and based on rather internal attitudes or beliefs. Because of this, Cary maintains some distance from calling a persons Christianity directly into question. Instead, she challenges them to ask questions about their behavior based on her approach to belief. With regard to whether Christians should partake in dance halls or not, she replies in a rather demeaning manor:
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My dear girlIf you can conscientiously indulge yourself in these amusements, after diligently searching the holy Records, and prayerfully endeavoring to understand the will of God, as there revealed to his creatures; if you can comprehend the divine laws in their full, spiritual interpretation, and yet think yourself safe in following the world to its appropriate haunts, surely no one can pretend to censure your practice. (Cary Letters, 105) In this way, Cary both avoids direct outward judgment, but leaves little room for justification of attending balls with a clean conscious. Clearly, those who are not diligent in their internal, spiritual discernment are not proper Virginian women. WORLDLY PEOPLE Those that get Otherised more than any other group by

Virginia Cary are worldly people. Her letters and stories are filled with the foibles and follies of people who continually suffer because of their lack of proper religious belief. Cary has a strong dichotomy separating the spiritual from the worldly. Worldly concerns are material, societal, or selfish. Christians become nominal by being overly concerned with worldly matters. Worldly people are a serious threat to believing females, specifically because they can be very amicable and yet still without religion. Cary warns Mary in her letters that unbelieving women are everywhere in society, but a woman without religion is a solecism in morals, a deformity in social life (Cary Letters, 19, 21). Mrs. Carys Tales focus primarily on examples of worldly people making bad decisions because of their lack of proper religious education. One Mrs. Bloomfield neglects the education of her idiot son, Paul, because of his slowness; while a virtuous neighbor, Mr. Roper, becomes his benefactor. When Paul is wrongfully accused of a murder his mother is beside herself with shame and is completely incapable of providing any support to Paul. It falls on Christian Mr. Roper to come to Pauls aid and help the court rightly discover that the drunkard son of the
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tavern owner committed the crime and incriminated Paul. Mr. Roper is the quintessential virtuous redeemer of a situation that got worse and worse by each consecutive act of worldly people. PEOPLE OF OTHER DENOMINATIONS Mrs. Cary is somewhat inconsistent

with regards to whether she believes Christians of other religions are also Christian. On one side she says that there is enough correct Christian principle in all denominations (Letters, 159), on the other she shares a long story of an Episcopalian family which she prayed fervently that they might be guided in the right way (Letters, 178). This is made the more extreme when the Episcopalian daughter catches tuberculosis. Virginia goes to their home and has a long exchange with the mother debating the rightness of her religion, implying that her doctrinal errors brought about the sickness. Mid-way through the conversation, the mother comments Nobody can accuse me of having neglected any of [my churchs] observances. Cary indicates that the problem is not that she was not religious enough, but that her religious expressions were not of the right kind to be acceptable (Letters, 179). In Virginia Carys Virginia, those who are not Christian enough, or completely without religion, or simply in the wrong denomination are all Otherised out of the norm. One has to ask who is then left in Virginias town that fits well within her prescribed norms? There are so many people to be admonished, and seemingly few to be praised. In the entirety of her letters to Mary, only herself, Emma, and Emilia (mentioned above) are exemplary figures. Every other person mentioned directly in the letters is used as an example of some Otherised form of behavior. In her Tales, there is typically one person, or one family that is righteous in a sea of morally wanting others. That one family is also always the hero of the story, the ones with the moral clarity to resolve the situation rightly at the expense of the morally corrupt neighbors. The
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overall effect of this discourse evokes an image of the Others being many, and the righteous being few. Worldly temptations abound and it takes strong and diligent character to maintain ones righteous identity. The discussion until now has rested on the assumption of whiteness. Worldly whites are a threat to righteous whites. But, for Cary, that is assumed and naming the racial aspect unnecessary because African Americans constitute a completely different category of Otherness. A PITIED OTHERING Othering Servants In contrast to various types of religious or non-religious peoples, Virginia Cary Otherises servants based on her perception that their moral abilities are limited by nature, and they are therefore to be pitied. Just as Cary contradictorily believes in the virtue of all Christian denominations in the abstract, but denounces Episcopalians specifically; so she similarly abhors the evils of slavery, but Otherises the servants. Slavery is indeed a fearful evil; a canker in the bud of our national prosperity; a bitter drop in the cup of domestic felicity (Letters, 202). Carys perspective on slavery and the treatment of servants is certainly nuanced from the stereotype of the impassionate slave-driving plantation owner. She very often refers to them as our fellow creatures which is a likening discourse rather than an Othering one. She uses this phrase whenever she is discussing how they should be treated by whites, to evoke pity. Cary certainly is a moderate slave owner. She believes that servants are too often beaten, too often chastised, that they should be taught upright and moral behavior, and that their moral condition is a consequence of the lack of initiative by their white owners. These beliefs certainly make her more progressive on this subject in the South. A careful examination of her beliefs and practices about slavery is warranted.
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DO SERVANTS HAVE MORAL CAPACITY? Virginia Cary, contrary to the dominant stereotype of Southern plantation owners, believes that servants can indeed learn proper behavior and refrain from evil. The opening story is one of her prime examples of wellbehaved and seemingly moral servants. The servants of Emmas have been taught by Emma herself in the moral teachings of Christianity. Indeed, Emma and by extension, Cary believe that it is only through their desire to obey God that they can properly obey their earthly masters. Is it not then logical for Cary that because slavery is a great evil, and servants have spiritual capacity that they are more like whites and should be emancipated? Not at all. The sum of her writings on the subject suggest that she believes that servants moral capacity is less than whites, which mandates their lowered position in society. This reflects the core of her understanding of the ordered world that God ordained. There is hierarchy on earthy because of the greater hierarchy of humanity to God. Just as the biblical figures of Adam and Eve were given care of the creatures and plants of the Garden of Eden, whites are given care of their servants, which requires a firm but compassionate hand and strong moral teaching. Some examples of how she Othersies servants illustrate this point. In her tale Of Danger and Debt: Or the Plaid Dress she mentions Lucy Adams, who should be pitied for [the] misfortune of having to be educated by the mulatto servant since her mother died when Lucy was young (Tales, 62). Servants then, have enough moral and mental capacity to indeed provide education; but an education that clearly hinders poor Lucy Adams compared to her white peers. In the tale Patient Paul, the slow-of-wit protagonist, Paul, is wrongfully accused of murder. It is his benefactor Mr. Roper and the mulatto tavern slave, Tom, that discover that the
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son of the tavern owner was the murderer and purposely incriminated poor Paul. The truth comes out in court by a slight of hand done by Tom. Stephens, the son, was drinking watered down spirits to get himself loose enough to lie to the court, but not drunk as to lose control of his tongue. But honest Tom had exchanged the tempered drinks for raw spirit, thinking this a fair retaliation of fraud for fraud (Tales, 54). Surely, the highly pious narrator does not condone acts of fraud! Being familiar with the New Testament, Cary also would not condone an eye for an eye types of justice since Jesus speaks out against it specifically. It is striking that she highlights Toms honesty while describing his fraud. His actions benefit the righteous so he is applauded. But could Mr. Roper have committed such an act? The mulatto is given the task, in this narrative, of doing the dirty work necessary for poor Paul to be victorious. Of course no one in the story is aware of this fraud. If it was uncovered, Tom certainly would have received punishment, and Stephens perhaps even acquitted. This leaves only the narrator and the reader with the secret information of Toms fraud. The message then is clear, narrator and reader can secretly enjoy Toms exemption from higher morality because of his mulatto nature. These examples show that Cary does indeed believe that servants have moral capacity. They likewise show that their capacity is distinctly different than that of whites. This distinction makes Cary pity them, and advocate for separating children from the influence of servants. CHILDREN AND SERVANTS In the introduction to her Tales, Cary

addresses the mothers of America and warns them that the most interesting part of the population of our country, is now under your superintendence. The continuance of our national prosperity depends, in no considerable degree, upon the manner in which you acquit yourselves of this trust (Tales, iii). Cary believes the proper education of children to be the most highly valued role of women. To this end she advocates that the most deadly of pernicious habits, is
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that of putting young slaves to be companions of young children. Surprisingly, it is not the influence of the slave on the white child that she fears, but rather that the infant despot enforces his lawless authority over his allotted victim, and thus encourages all the most malignant vices of his nature (Letters, 206). In caring for the education of their children, mothers should not allow them to have power over slaves because it encourages their prideful, untrained nature to grow and develop into violent and malevolent behaviors. As a protection for the child, from the childs own self, mothers should dress their own children, children should help each as much as possible, so as to limit their interaction with slaves as much as possible. In creating so much distance between children and slaves, Cary is making a statement about slavery and the condition the servants find themselves in. Specifically, children should be told Tis not because they are slaves, (should be said,) but because they are uneducated, unprincipled people, that you are instructed to avoid them. You are kept away for the same reason from dissolute, unprincipled white people. It is their condition that should be avoided, not their race. In this way she can equally put immoral whites in that category. The difference is though that white should know better. Servants, on the other hand, should be pitied. You must pity these people while you avoid them. It is not their fault, but their misfortune, that they have not been instructed as you have in morals and religion (Letters, 207). The obvious question then is: Can children associate with Emmas slaves, who have been educated in morals and religion? Cary does not elaborate enough to answer that, but it is easy to make a negative inference. Additionally, in Carys introduction to her Tales, she does provide one caveat to a slaves dutiful obedience to their master, that is: provided at least that ruler be a christian (Tales, xiv). That is a very complicated statement. Would she advocate for emancipation if the large majority of slave owners were professed non-believers? Further, if
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slavery itself is such an evil, why is it that Christians are best fit to enjoy that evil? Such questions highlight the fuzzy logic employed in Carys Othering; to which I am certain she would say that such intellectual activities are better left to men, as we will see in the next section. Cumulatively, Carys unique perspective on slaves on one hand elevates their situation, but keeps them pitied by both distancing them from the children and teaching them only enough morality to keep them obedient. The Othering power Cary exerts over slaves here is not meant for them, that power is assumed. Instead, this is an encouragement to her readers to Otherise slaves rightly. Cary wants to simultaneously shape the identity of slaves in white ladies minds in order to change white southern house-wives behavior towards their servants. It is a powerful, multi-layered Othering. A SELF-SUBJUGATED OTHERIZING Othering the Race of Women as a Woman This form of Othering is a bit of a reversal. It is rooted in the specific phenomena of how southern evangelical women expressed their own subjugation to men in society. I contend that one of Virginia Carys primary motivators in writing to the women of Virginia is to shape the role of women in society as rightfully Other than that of the predominant male. This raises the question of whether or not it is possible to Otherise oneself. By reversing the concept of Othering it is clear that it is both possible and that there is historical precedent for it specifically in the Bible and in western church history. If Othering is an attempt to gain power by defining another group or demographic of society in ways that separate them from yourself, then a self-subjugated Othering attempts to define your own people group in a way that gives

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power to another group over your own. This topic alone is worth a full study2. For our purposes here I will remain focused on some examples in Virginia Carys writings. As we saw earlier, Cary understands the world, and even the cosmos, in terms of a God ordained hierarchy. Just as God is lord over humanity, so is there hierarchy within human society that is right and beneficial. For Southern gentry and plantation owners the hierarchy is clear: the Father, the Mother, the children, and the slaves in descending order. This means that the Father is the representative of the household in all matters. It is then only logical that under a representative form of government that when it comes to matters of state or county that the Fathers are the representatives for the whole community in all meetings of political importance. This necessarily leaves the woman as the domestic helpmate, caring for children, and managing the house and land, with the optional but optimal help of servants if possible. What happens then, when society is defined by the men that rule over it? They are the norm, and you, as a woman become the Other. When faced with such a circumstance one can either resist with very little hope of success, or justify the status quo by self-subjugating yourself. This is the route Virginia Cary takes when she claims that it is no derogation from the dignity or utility of woman, to declare that she is inferior to man in moral as well as in physical strength (Letters, 21). More specifically, Cary advances that women must not shrink from obedience, for it is their scriptural duty; from subordination, for it is their safe and proper grade in the scale of social life (Letters, 44).

Another aspect of self-subjugating Othering worthy of study might be ways in which slaves themselves justified their subjugation. This might be particularly true of such well-mannered slaves as those that Cary references that have been taught religious values equating their ability to obey their earthly master with their obedience to God. Virginia Cary and the Others Page 13 of 17 Matt Cromwell Thursday, December 8, 2011

Every example she provides of a woman who seeks independence over her husband is a negative one. One Mrs. Bloomfield (Tales, The Judicious Legacy) married her husband because of the large inheritance he was rumored to receive upon his fathers imminent death. When they received the inheritance, she took her girls completely neglecting the boys and they would ransack the town of its fashionable items and household nick-knacks. Her husband suddenly disappeared at one point for two years. Within a year of the disappearance, Mrs. Bloomfield is destitute, the wealth had run dry. She is so confounded by her lack of wealth that she simply dies. Her boys were brought up outside the home and turned out quite well, as opposed to the girls, whos only hope was to be adopted by a righteous male friend of the family. Cary concludes saying, a silly woman is always hard enough to manage, but when bad temper and selfishness combine with extravagance to turn a weak brain, the north wind is not harder to restrain than such a character (Tales, 102-103). At the end of the story, everything the woman has touched is ruined. It takes the male neighbors to bring the young girls back to decency. The husband, was actually sent away by a hidden clause in his fathers will, and earn a living from menial work. He is transformed by the experience and returns with a new hidden inheritance from his father, and his real trouble the woman is gone. Virginia Cary is self-aware enough of how difficult her message of self-subjugation is. I know, my dear girl, that I am in danger of encountering a host of female prejudices, when I venture unequivocally to recommend the doctrine of conjugal obedience. She nonetheless believes that Christian submission can suggest many sweet and sacred paliatives. The grander narrative of American history will prove that Mrs. Cary is surely swimming against the stream at this time. Women were making slow but steady gains in rights and opportunities. How counterintuitive it must have felt for women to be asked to shrink from public influence and in the name
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of their religion? Without the broader context of Carys whole definition of womanhood it would be an even harder pill to swallow. VIRGINIA CARYS DEFINTION OF WOMANHOOD After this slew of Othering from Mrs. Cary we are left with a very narrow definition of a southern woman, and not surprisingly it is virtually a mirror image of Virginia Cary herself. A white woman in Virginia should be a model evangelical Christian, humble in appearance and behavior, who abstains from worldly haunts and affections. She should know her place in the home as the primary caregiver and moral teacher of her children who she always cares for directly, never leaving them to the care of servants. She must be slow to anger. In resisting provocation to violence she treats her slaves well and provides them with moral and religious teaching. This is the continually flowing discourse supporting all of Carys narratives. Historian, Eve Kornfeld says that a central role in the process of Othering belongs to narrative (Kornfeld). Virginia Cary is an excellent narrator. That is exactly what Cary does through these works. She is using her influence as a morally upright lady of society to exert power over the definition of womanhood in Virginian society. In the end we return to the infamous Mary, a young girl who recently lost her mother. Mrs. Cary sought to maintain Marys anonymity, so we do not know what kind of conditions she is left in after the death of her mother. Is her father wealthy enough to hire a tutor for her education, or must she now also be educated by a mulatto slave? How does Mary receive these obviously well-intentioned letters from Mrs. Cary? Does she hang on each word eagerly or is she convicted by her own actions? Perhaps she feels alienated from Virginia because she resembles too well the women without religion that Mrs. Cary warns should be avoided? We cannot know,
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but we should note how powerful Mrs. Carys narratives are. Societies may claim to be shaped by grand historical events, or significant leaders; but how many womens identities were radically changed for better or for worse by this kind of Othering discourse, used while hanging clothes to dry, or at local markets? How forcefully are gender roles influenced by societal progenitors? Considering how familiar many of Carys dictates sound to our modern ears it would seem this aging, evangelical widow was influential enough.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Cary, Constance. American Children at Home and in Society The Century Magazine. a popular quarterly; Volume 25 (Mar. 1883), New York: Century Co. Digital Edition: http://books.google.com/books?id=garPAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA796&ots=qwFjLnC1a&dq=%22American%20Children%20at%20Home%20and%20in%20Society %22&pg=PA796#v=onepage&q=%22American%20Children%20at%20Home%20and% 20in%20Society%22&f=false. Accessed December 8, 2011. Cary, Constance Harrison. A Virginia Girl in Her First Year of War The Century Magazine. A popular quarterly; Volume 30 (Aug. 1885), New York: Century Co. Digital Edition: http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HarVirg.sgm&images=images/ modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all. Accessed December 8, 2011. Cary, Virginia Randolph. Letters on female character addressed to a young lady on the death of her mother. Ariel Works, Main Street, 1828. Digital edition: http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=OMciAAAAMAAJ&dq=Letters+on+female+charact er&as_brr=5. Accessed December 8, 2011. Cary, Virginia Randolph. Christian parent's assistant, or, Tales, for the moral and religious instruction of youth. Ariel Works, Main Street, 1829. Digital edition: http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=MOsCAAAAQAAJ&dq=Christian%20parent%27s %20assistant&as_brr=5&source=webstore_bookcard. Accessed December 8, 2011. Chastellux, Franois Jean. 1963. Travels in North America: Travels in North America : in the years 1780, 1781, and 1782. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va. by the University of North Carolina Press. Kierner, Cynthia "The Dark and Dense Cloud Perpetually Lowering over Us: Gender and the Decline of the Gentry in Postrevolutionary Virginia. Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 185-217. Randolph, Mary. The Virginia Housewife: Or Methodical Cook. 1860. Digital Edition: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12519. June 1, 2004. Public Domain in the USA. Accessed December 8, 2011.

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