The Big House after Slavery examines the economic, social, and political challenges that Virginia planter families faced following Confederate defeat and emancipation. Amy Feely Morsman addresses how men and women of the planter class responded to postwar problems and how their adaptations to life without slavery altered their marital relationships and their conceptions of gender roles.

Unable to afford many servants in the new free labor economy, many of Virginia's former masters put themselves to work on their plantations, and their wives had to expand their responsibilities...