My name is Dr. Marie Molloy and I am Senior Lecturer in American History at Manchester Metropolitan University. My expertise is in slavery, race and gender in the nineteenth-century American South.

I am the author of two books; Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2018); and The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered Negotiating the Peripheries (Routledge, 2019) with co-author L.R. Sandy. My work has also been featured in the journals American Nineteenth Century History and Journal of Family History.

My current research examines race relations, gender, and class in the context of slavery in the US.

What is your research project?

My current research examines race relations, gender, and class in the context of slavery in the US. My book project Sex, Scandal and Marital Breakdown: Women and Sexual Infidelity Across the Colour Line 1800-1867 examines the impact of interracial sex between married white women and enslaved men or free men of colour.

Race, class and gender ideals have often cast white, southern women in a positive light in which whites frame themselves as pure and righteous relative to black women and men. This project analyses the divorce petitions of hundreds of white men with a key focus on female adultery that resulted in marital breakdown. Despite the taboos regarding interracial sex, the petitions reveal white women were often involved in consensual and forced sexual encounters across the colour line with enslaved persons and free blacks. These relations frequently results in the birth of mixed-race children, some of whom were falsely sold into slavery; others were raised in the white or black family.

Students have frequent opportunities to get involved with research related activities.

What is your main focus in this project?

My monograph explores the historical context of divorce in the South, the reasons that led men to divorce their wives, and the success or failure in securing a divorce. Through painstaking research in the archives, the book seeks to uncover what became of the black men who engaged in sex across the colour line with white, married women of various social classes. It will seek to trace what happened to enslaved men who could be falsely accused of raping a white woman, and sent to the gallows, as part of a white woman’s desperate attempt to cover up her own sexual infidelity. 

What skills does a project like this involve?

Researching a sensitive topic such as this requires tenacity and patience, as sex across the colour line was seldom spoken about openly. An exception to this, is the court records, which reveal a colourful and often devastatingly honest account of marital disharmony.

How did you go about researching your project?

During a research sabbatical in October 2022, I conducted 5-weeks’ research in various archives in the USA, in North Carolina and Virginia. I visited the African American History Museum in Washington D.C.

My research is integral to my teaching practice, and it enables me to share cutting edge research with students.

How does your research inform students’ learning?

I regularly discuss my research experiences with students in my MA classes. It is my firm belief, that what we research deeply informs our teaching at every level.

My research is integral to my teaching practice, and it enables me to share cutting edge research with students. As unit leader of the MA unit Women and Slavery I use my research as a springboard to discuss key themes: gender and racial stereotypes, race, sexuality and violence, white women as perpetrators of the slave system, motherhood, female resistance and activism, and divorce. In the MA unit Race and Gender in Historical Perspective, students examine broader topics connected to my research: birth control, abortion, forced sterilisation and feminism.

Can students get involved?

Students have frequent opportunities to get involved in research related activities, including paid work in assisting with conference organisation, class visits to the Race Relation Centre and archives, attending and writing up reports on seminar papers, and assisting in a wide variety of outreach events with local schools and colleges.

Find out more about MA History.