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Reviewed by:
  • Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times ed. by Melissa A. McEuen, Thomas H. Appleton Jr.
  • Penny Messinger
Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times. Edited by Melissa A. McEuen and Thomas H. Appleton Jr. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 432. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4453-9; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4452-2.)

How have women shaped Kentucky history? This well-edited collection of seventeen essays provides an answer in biographical form, profiling twenty-three notable women. Their stories span three centuries and encompass an ambitious range of topics, including frontier life, marriage and divorce, [End Page 163] public widowhood, Civil War Unionism, suffrage, social settlements, art and literature, civil rights, politics, and entrepreneurship. The legacy of Kentucky’s frontier past, the consciousness of regional and border-state identity, and the tension that women faced in reconciling family and societal expectations with individual ambition are recurring themes in the collection’s essays.

Craig Thompson Friend’s opening essay introduces “the female frontier” and pioneering women as frames for the volume (p. 10). Friend challenges the “gentle tamer” paradigm often used in histories of pioneering women with an intersectional approach addressing privilege and oppression in an essay that contrasts the lives of Shawnee warrior-chief Nonhelema Hokolesqua, Jemima Boone Callaway, and Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, an enslaved woman. Many of the subsequent essays profile elite white women who were indeed pioneers in challenging gender constraints, although they often held tight to privileges and prejudices. Angela Esco Elder’s essay about Emilie Todd Helm and her sister, Mary Todd Lincoln, contrasts Helm’s influential seventy-year “career” as a Confederate widow with her older sister’s unpopular public persona as “a diva of grief” (p. 84). While Helm fulfilled expectations for public mourning and facilitated national reconciliation among whites, Elder argues that Helm also helped legitimate concepts of Confederate nationhood and the Lost Cause. Likewise, Andrea S. Watkins’s essay about diarists Frances Dallam Peter and Josie Underwood highlights Kentucky’s deep divisions during the Civil War. Both the Peter and the Underwood families remained staunchly Unionist despite pressure from neighbors and occupying troops, but as Watkins shows, “Unionist” was not synonymous with “abolitionist.” Peter rejected abolitionism, and the Underwoods were slaveholders.

The Clay and Breckinridge families, both politically prominent during the antebellum era, produced daughters who played key roles in Progressive-era reforms and who feature prominently in this collection. William Kuby’s essay on Mary Jane Warfield Clay reveals the economic vulnerability of nineteenth-century women during marriage and after divorce. Mary Jane Smith’s essay on Warfield Clay’s daughter, Laura Clay, highlights tensions between gender and race in the movement for woman suffrage. Lindsey Apple’s essay persuasively argues that Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (a worthy heir to her great-grandfather, Henry Clay) used her political skills to promote an ambitious reform agenda that included education, children’s rights, and woman suffrage. However, like most southern Progressives, Breckinridge devoted little public attention to racial segregation.

McDowell Breckinridge’s sister-in-law, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge and Sophonisba’s cousin Mary Breckinridge, founder of the Frontier Nursing Service, are also profiled. Sophonisba rejected the conservative racial and gender norms instilled by her family and became a pioneering social scientist who helped set professional standards for social work and influenced governmental policy. Both Sophonisba and Mary Breckinridge drew on kinship and social networks to pursue significant political and social reform efforts, along with friends Katherine Pettit and May Stone, founders of social settlements at Hindman and Pine Mountain in eastern Kentucky, and Linda Neville, a public health reformer who battled trachoma and infant [End Page 164] blindness in eastern Kentucky. Seeking to live meaningful lives, these women reshaped the definition of political action through measures such as increasing access to health care and expanding educational opportunities, often using maternalist approaches.

Other “pioneering women” challenged traditional race relations and the gender conventions of their time. Civil rights activist Anne McCarty Braden, who was white, drew on the story of her pioneer ancestor Anne Pogue McGinty to challenge segregation. As author Catherine Fosl shows, Braden’s deep Kentucky roots legitimated her efforts to...

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