interesting


I missed the first 30 minutes of this on showtime today, and didn't realize until the end that this woman's journal actually ended up having a dramatic effect on the Civil War. It was read into the record at the Parliamentary procedings in England in the debate as to whether England would help fund the Confederate cause against the North. England's motivation was to maintain a source of cheap cotton for the textile industry that was so basic to England at the time. But (maybe because she had a reputation in England as a noted English actress) her journal made such a sensation with its description of the evils of slavery in the Southern cotton plantations, it influenced the Parliamentary vote against bankrolling the South.
I thought it gave a good view not only of the situation of the slaves, but also of the situation of women, even in the U.S., in Victorian times, when they were legally and socially under the control of their husbands.

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