The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (review)

2??8Book Reviews213 and Filipinos he encountered in die course of his travels. While his knowledge of medicine and the world around him grew, so did the United States. When he entered the U.S. Army the frontier was still a very real part of American life; by the time Corbusier retired, the United States had become an urban, industrialized , world power. Wooster's editing and annotation are thorough and informative. One minor criticism is the lack of maps. There are only two maps in Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar, and at times it is difficult to follow Corbusier's many moves around the country. Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar should be read and compared to its companion volume by Fanny Dunbar Corbusier, William Henry Corbusier's wife of forty-eight years (see Fanny Dunbar Corbusier: Recollections ofHerArmy Life, 1869—1908, ed. by Patricia Y. Stallard, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). Both works are valuable contributions to American, and especially Western, history of the second half of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The combination of excellent scholarship , editing, and annotation makes these primary documents readily available to both scholars and the general public. McNeese State UniversityTerry Beckenbaugh The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. By Jane Turner Censer. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii+316. Acknowledgments, illustrations, epilogue, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-80712go7 "0. $59.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8071-2921-6. $24.95, Paper.) Readers may find the title of this impressively researched and persuasively argued work slightly misleading. As the author frankly acknowledges at the outset , the real focus is on elite white women (defined as those from families having fifteen or more slaves during the antebellum period) in Virginia and North Carolina; nonelite white women make very few appearances in the book. Nevertheless, the author draws from a broad base of sources, including correspondence , deeds, wills, and novels, and builds on the works of historians such as Anne Firor Scott and Edward Ayers to construct a thoroughly convincing portrait of an elite white womanhood caught in a period of "flux" (p. 50). The Civil War and the collapse of slavery, argues Censer, affected elite white women in complex ways. Expectations for these women, which before the war had centered on courtship and marriage, were called into question as women became increasingly willing to stay single, travel without chaperones, and study practical subjects in schools and academies. Paradoxically, married women in this period became "far more domesticated" (p. 89) as former house slaves deserted their mistresses and saddled them with household chores. This new domesticity was fed by a drift away from the nuclear family, the household structure prevalent among the region's elites before the war, and toward a multigenerational and laterally extended one. Women of die New South were also expected to care for and redeem their male relatives from depression and alcoholism, which Censer seems to suggest were on the rise following Appomattox. Property ownership was yet another aspect of women's lives that was in transition. Censer main- 214Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober tains that the antebellum trend toward greater property rights continued into the postwar era, augmented by testators' increased willingness to divide estates equally among sons and daughters. Even with more women controlling property, fewer were choosing to live on plantations. Censer argues diat elite white women in fact led the flight from the countryside, motivated by frustrations in dealing with servants and laborers and a fear of being isolated in rural areas with large numbers of black men. Those who moved to urban areas moved tentatively into "public" life, with many single women working as schoolteachers and othersjoining benevolent societies. She concludes the book with two chapters on women writers and literature. It is a truism that the historiography of the postwar South revolves around questions of change and continuity and is rarely, if ever, taken on its own terms. To her credit, Censer consistently avoids simplistic endorsements of one over the other. Instead, each chapter is ajudicious examination of change and continuity in a single aspect ofwomen's lives, the result being a complex portrait of an elite white womanhood in transition. At the same time, the notion ofwomen "in transition...