Minrose Gwin's book, Black and White Women of the Old South, argues that history has problems with objectivity. Her book brings to life interesting takes on views of Old South women and chattel slavery in American historical fiction and autobiography. Gwin's main arguments were that Southern white women did not want to show any kind of compassion for another woman of African descent. Gwin described the “sisterhood” between black and white women as a “violent connection” (p. 4). Not only that, Gwin's book discusses the idea that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a black woman was usually subjected to the displacement of white women's sexual and mental frustration. Gwin discusses how these black women, due to sexual and mental abuse, felt despised by whites and therefore reduced even to a level below that of white women's status as a woman. . A white Southern slave owner saw black women as just another slave, or worse. White women had to do this to avoid feeling of higher status than anyone else except their husband. White women, as Gwin describes, always demonstrated that they were in complete control and black women had to bow to them. Gwin's book discusses that white male slave owners brought this to black women on the plantation. They would rape black women and then instead of white women they would deal with their husbands. They would only go after black women since the wives had no power over their husbands, but they maintained total control over the slaves, the white women would attack the black women and make their lives very difficult. White women would make sure that black women understood that white women completely hated black women for being raped and only wanted pain for them. This is how black women of that time acquired the stereotypes of being very sexual beings and hated by their oppressors. You can see evidence of this when Gwin discussed the reality of such hatred in the book Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. The protagonist, Clizia, is troubled by sexual assaults by her male master because she does not wish to be involved with him, but her mistress feels she should be punished for it. So the white slave owner... in the center of the card... the man stops her from going past the dark skin, and makes the white women feel more like Africans are more animals than actual people. White women always feel that the slave must understand that the man may have a higher rank than her, but even if her husband wants to joke, the blame goes to the slave and not the husbands. And the slave will never be on his level, because the black slave will never be a lady. And in the book you can see how white women lost power in the home and that the system of life that they had been given no longer proved to suit them, so they had to try to adapt to a way that life was going to take. They. I think Gwin argues that the main reason for the power struggle became evident in the fact that it got to the point that some black women would not let themselves be beaten by their own owners. This is an example of how not only did white women challenge the system, but also how enslaved women began to change how they wanted to be treated. Bibliographic citation Gwin, Minrose. Black and white women of the old south. Knoxville: Tennessee Press, 1985.