how did southern women feel about slavery?

Answer 1

There's quite an ongoing debate about this, and of course the answer depends on whether you're talking about the plantation class, merchant class, or poor white women, or black women before or after Emancipation, or whatever other grouping you care to imagine. Within, for example, the plantation class, scholars have looked to these women's diaries to show everything from deep racial hatred to deep hatred of the institution of slavery -- sometimes within the same diary. Some plantation-class women recognized that their position in society was a result of the institution of slavery -- both to their benefit and also to their detriment. (I'm assuming you're interested in how white women felt because it's fairly obvious that black women objected to slavery.) Poor white women felt anything from a common cause with black women in slavery, to an abiding threat once freed slaves were competing with them and their male relatives for work. There's an interesting story in the founding of the anti-lynching campaign, wherein white southern women organized to protest lynchings -- they basically said, we don't need protection from black men, so cut it out already. There are a number of texts on this subject. Sorry to go on ... this is one aspect of my doctoral dissertation. Check out some of the sources below for more info.

Answer 2

Do you have some reason to believe that ALL women from the south can be lumped under having one opinion?

Answer 3

The same as southern men - some approved, some didn't - some approved with stipulations, some didn't.