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  • Stepping Lively in Place: The Not-Married, Free Women of Civil-War-Era Natchez, Mississippi by Joyce Linda Broussard
  • Angela Boswell
Stepping Lively in Place: The Not-Married, Free Women of Civil-War-Era Natchez, Mississippi. By Joyce Linda Broussard ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. xvi plus 338 pp. $84.95).

This book is a meticulously researched study of single, widowed, and divorced women in Natchez, Mississippi, before, during, and after the Civil War. Broussard has mined very rich public records, including census, probate, divorce, and criminal and civil case records. She has supplemented this information with private documents such as diaries and letters. With this extensive approach to [End Page 1113] documents, she has been able to piece together an in-depth look at the lives of women who would otherwise be left out of the historical narrative.

Divided into nine chapters, the first chapter describes Natchez, while the next five chapters explore separate groups of free, unmarried women in the city during the antebellum period. White women who never married exercised more control over their personal and legal lives than married women, but they lacked the protection and affection that a husband provided in the southern patriarchal society. Seventy-six white women filed for divorce from their husbands, complaining of "extreme physical battery, adultery with enslaved or lewd women, abandonment, habitual inebriation," and/or gambling" (87), while thirty-four men filed for divorce from their wives. Control of property and desire to escape physical abuse were prime motivating factors for women to risk the social opprobrium of divorce. Widows gained more control of their personal and legal lives at the deaths of their husbands, most often living off the widow's dower. Over half headed the household in which they lived, and only one-quarter lived in a household headed by a male. Few had occupations, and generally they were financially more secure than most other single women. Free black women in Natchez were embraced "as relatively free spirits who often lived in autonomous households because [of] their sexual, emotional, and familial connections" with white men. The last chapter devoted to the antebellum period explores the lives of "disorderly" women or women who found themselves in criminal courts. Despite the fact that these single, divorced, widowed, free black, and criminal women lived outside the socially accepted norms of wives and mothers dependent upon a man, the author argues that they were accepted as normal anomalies because neither they nor their overt actions challenged patriarchy nor slavery.

The last three chapters examine the impact of the Civil War on single women, the ways that even married women during the war had to often act as single women, and the circumstances after the war that provoked single women to act in less subservient roles. Most women did not have "the time or resources to pursue impractical cultural expectations for women once slavery and the world it supported had ended" (232). In a very muted and nuanced argument, the author shows that the war was probably not a watershed moment for women's rights in the South, but that it forever changed women's lives and expectations, shattering the ideal of the servant role for women.

One of the greatest strengths of the work is the compilation and description of the laws that affected and restricted women's lives. The author uses these strictures as well as census data to discuss each group as a whole, delving into pieces of women's lives about which there is little additional information. In each chapter, the author also provides very interesting vignettes of particular women about whom a little bit more is known, providing in many ways a collective biography of widowed, single, divorced, free black, and criminal women in this one southern town.

The author's approach has many strengths, but its emphasis on individual stories often detracts from understanding the group as a whole. Many times throughout the book, after presenting the historical factors that shaped women's lives, she stresses that "what it meant to be female and not married …differed for each non-married women who lived during those years" (205). The author does make periodic...

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