Meet the Moderators: Dr. Stephanie Richmond
Dr. Stephanie Richmond is one of the moderators of the “Becoming American and the Spirit Voice: Identity Politics, Gender and Religion” panel. Dr. Stephanie Richmond is an assistant professor of history at Norfolk State University. She teaches courses on US history before 1877, including classes on African-American history, women’s history and reform. She is currently working on her first book, a study of the intersection of gender roles and the middle class in the anti-slavery movement in the US and Britain. In her spare time, she dabbles in traditional women’s crafts such as spinning and baking artisanal bread. Dr. Richmond’s talk focuses on the class divisions between women in the colonial Chesapeake and how women related to one another across racial lines, sharing foodways, medicinal knowledge and household duties and in the process created a uniquely American culture in the home. She starts her talk by examining the folk song “The Trappan’d Maiden or the Distressed Damsel,” a seventeenth century song about the life of an indentured servant woman in Virginia. These working women, black, white and native American, had much more in common with one another than they did with the wives of the planters, and shared amongst themselves recipes, knowledge and support, creating a working female world in the Chesapeake.
Anadama bread is a traditional colonial bread recipe that combines wheat flour with cornmeal and molasses. It got its name, according to legend, when a woman, named Anna, left her husband alone and only left him some cornmeal mush mixed with molasses. He added flour, yeast and salt to create this bread, and muttered ‘Anna damn her” while baking it. Genteel Yankees then changed the name to Anadama, playing on the New Englander’s penchant for dropping the final “r” from words.