Research mid-nineteenth-century American views of motherhood and domesticity and compare those views to Stowe's portrayal of mothers and motherhood.

Look at actual nineteenth-century slave narratives written by both women and men, and consider the ways in which slavery was different for each sex.

In what ways had slavery been built into an economic necessity in the agrarian antebellum South? Why might slaveholders sympathetic to the slaves' plight not have freed their slaves?