The Plantation Mistress focuses on the elite women living on plantations with twenty or more slaves in the seven seaboard states of the plantation South during the period between 1780 and 1835. Through the study of nearly 500 manuscript collections that housed the contents of family letters, household inventories, the papers of female academies, commonplace books and physicians" records Clinton attempts to shed light upon the hidden lives of southern plantation mistresses, who she states, have been prisoners of myth, legend, and folklore. Many of the diaries and memoirs she studied are unpublished and unexamined.
Clinton reveals the life of a plantation mistress and her role as wife, mother, and household manager in the antebellum South. Additional areas of discussion include kinship, courtship, marriage, and divorce; moral standards; health and childbearing; the isolation of plantation life; the "curse of slavery" and the "sexual dynamics of slavery." .
Clinton believed that southern women occupied an undesirable position with respect to women of the North. She found that southern women married at a younger age, had more children, and died earlier, often in childbirth. They were also burdened with more complex tasks of household management and lived in greater isolation; thus reducing the female companionship of emotional support and social gatherings. Far from the life of leisure, women were really prisoners of the southern male system.
Clinton states that slavery contributed to the oppression of women: "Patriarchy was the bedrock upon which the slave society was founded, and slavery exaggerated the pattern of subjugation that patriarchy had established" (p. 6) It was an oppression that equaled and in some ways exceeded that experienced by slaves. "These women were merely prisoners in disguise" (p. 109).
Overall, women in the antebellum South were generally overworked, often unhealthy, and little freer than their slaves.