Public versus Private Spheres in Southern Law and Politics

Anna R. Hayes has written an insightful biography of North Carolina's history-making judge Susie Marshall Sharp. She makes a significant contribution to gender studies by examining Sharp as the first woman in the state's history to become a trial judge and a state Supreme Court Justice and also the first women in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state's highest court. Even so, the book ranges beyond these impressive public achievements, revealing a private life at odds with public respectability. Indeed, Hayes' strong evidence delineates the pronounced contradictions between Sharp's inner and public selves. Overcoming gender boundaries and fulfilling professional ambitions, Sharp's public rationale was that she placed career over marriage and motherhood. She insisted publically and privately that a woman, unlike a man, had to choose. In this public assertion, as well as in matters concerning race and partisan politics, Sharp was a conventional Southern moderate. She nonetheless defied conventions regarding sexual monogamy. Hayes explains well these and other inconsistencies, relying on massive manuscript and contextual evidence rather than psychology. She suggests that Sharp embodied both the potential and the limits for change in the twentieth-century South.

Hayes narrates Sharp's origins and rise very much as a life-and-times story of twentieth-century North Carolina. Generally considered the South's foremost representative of business progressivism, the state's economy and politics—as well as race and gender relations—periodically had national ramifications. Hayes demonstrates Sharp's connections to these larger developments through the legal and political ties Sharp shared with state leaders like Terry Sanford and nationally prominent individuals such as Sam Ervin, who achieved fame during the Watergate crisis. More importantly, Hayes closely examines the vital web of grass-roots relations within and among numerous county courthouses. Sharpe's public connections were interwoven with her immediate and extended family and kinship bonds and embodied the Southern way of life. Finally, Hayes shows, these publically known relationships entwined with Sharp's hidden, decades-long love affairs with three married men, and then, late in life, with a widower. Indeed, this is a biography of private and public relationships. Hayes keeps in clear focus the diverse and obscure strands converging to define Sharp's life, the impressive range of her accomplishments, and, ultimately, her wide impact on many people within North Carolina and beyond.

In both real life and in fiction, a strong sense of place and family epitomized the South and its people, and Sharp was no exception. Her father, James Merritt Sharp, was from the yeoman class whose quest for precarious personal independence did so much to define both slave and Jim-Crow North Carolina and the South generally. He married Annie Britt Blackwell, whose family belonged to Virginia's social aristocracy, descendent from the Old South's slave-holding planters. Although Sharp's marriage enhanced his social status and respectability, it did not alleviate chronic economic insecurity. As a farmer, teacher, and small entrepreneur, he temporarily succeeded before succumbing to failure, buffeted by North Carolina's rocky New South market economy. Susie, the couple's firstborn in 1907, always remembered an early childhood defined by material loss. Particularly poignant was her mother's noble bearing while collectors seized the family's possessions following her father's bankruptcy. A pronounced relief to these painful recollections was her father's eventual attainment of middle-class respectability as a lawyer and politician in Reidsville, a small town and county seat of Rockingham County in northern North Carolina, bordering the Blue Ridge Mountains and Virginia.

Sharp's family and small-town life shaped her future. Her powerful will, precocious ambition, and profound sensitivity to personal motivations derived from her father's care and local leadership as a lawyer. Also formative was her mother's instilling of social and personal obligations emanating from what Sharp and her four siblings learned were their Southern aristocratic origins...