"She Will Be Quite the Manager": From Plantation Owner to Girl Boss
Event Details
What do a Civil War-era plantation owner and a modern “girl boss” have in common? More than you think.
Adelicia Acklen and Dorothy Thomas were two of the most powerful plantation-owning women—one in the US South and the other in South America—but both wielded the power of ownership by deploying and playing on particular ideas of femininity. This talk traces their unsettling legacy into the present, asking what happens when women gain power within systems built on inequality.
Your Speaker:
Tanya Shields
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
More about Professor Shields
Tanya Shields’s research focuses on Caribbean studies and plantation logics. She teaches classes on the Caribbean, the arts of activism, growing up girls globally, and the continuing influence of plantation economics and politics
She is currently at work on her second monograph, Gendered Labor: Race, Place and Power on Female-Owned Plantations, a comparative study of women who owned plantations in the Caribbean and U.S. South.
Details
DATE & TIME: Thursday, September 17, 2026 | 5:30 pm
COST: Free admission. Registration required.
LOCATION: Ackland Art Museum
