"In this collection, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. Through six essays, she explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery by closely examining individuals like white plantation mistress turned feminist Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and black Communist Hosea Hudson.

Painter defies the usual boundaries of southern history, women's history, and African American history and transcends methodological barriers as well, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science in addition to social, cultural and intellectual history."--BOOK JACKET.