Beyond Image and Convention Explorations in Southern Women's History, and: Women of the American South A Multicultural Reader (review)

of Democracy Betrayed point out, "by naming public parks, buildings, and streets after them." In 1998, however, at one of the events noting die centennial of the riot, North Carolina erected a new state historical marker that tells accurately of Manly and the riot. This marker is only a start, even in Wilmington, but perhaps what happened here in 1998 can inspire other communities across the U.S. to bring back to community awareness those events they have suppressed, in the process beginning a healing civic dialogue like Wilmington's. Beyond Image and Convention Explorations in Southern Women's History Edited byJanet L. Coryell, Martha H. Swain, Sandra Gioia Treadway, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner University ofMissouri Press, 1998 224 pp. Paper $16.95, Cloth $37.50 Women of the American South A Multicultural Reader Edited By Christie Anne Farnham New York University Press, 1997 319 pp. Paper $18.95, Cloth $5 5.00 Reviewed by Qeorgina Hickey, assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University, who currendy is finishing a manuscript on workingclass women and urban development after the turn of the century in Adanta, and who also is starting a study of a WPA sewing project and the challenges its administration raised to New Deal idealism in the urban South. Most students of southern history long ago realized that the Southern Belle was not an accurate reflection ofwomanhood in die Soudi, not even for the wives of wealthy plantation owners. Certainly the impetus for two recent collections of original essays on southern women reflects this. Women ofthe American South: A MulticulturalReader brings together sixteen never-before-published articles and a historiographical/autobiographical essay by the matriarch of the field, Anne Firor Scott. BeyondImage and Convention: Explorations in Southern Women'sHistory is a collection of nine defdy edited articles drawn from papers given in 1994 at the Third Southern Conference on Women's History. Beyond challenging oneReviews 93 dimensional depictions ofsouthern women, these anthologies encourage us to see the South in general, and not just its women, in all its multifaceted complexity. What Women oftheAmerican South does best is to challenge those interested in the lives and experiences of southern women to see the ways in which diose lives and experiences were intertwined and shaped by one another. It is not so much that the South was and is a multicultural region, but that the culture ofthe region is one derived more from diversity than has traditionally been recognized. It is precisely the relationships between groups seemingly divided by edinicity, class, sub-region, and, of course, race, that created the South as a distinct region. The articles Farnham chose for this volume focus on the experiences ofwomen from a variety ofperspectives, reminding us that just because women may have shared a common regional identity does not imply that being a southern woman meant the same tiling to all or even most women. Taken as a whole, Christie Farnham's collection Women oftheAmerican South also invites a reconsideration of die meaning of "multiculturalism." This term, now stock material in the larger field of women's history, is growing a bit tiresome from overuse and under-theorization. In the context of the Farnham collection, it is used primarily as a reference to diversity—the mix of races and classes present in the South. Yet it seems that many of us, Farnham included, long for some sort of meta-narrative that would pull these diverse stories together. The answer to that longing, as the essays in Women oftheAmerican South suggest, seems to come from expanding our understanding of die regional cultures contained within Southernism. So how can we have many cultures but only one region? For Farnham and her authors, the answer to this question and die key to understanding multiculturalism in the South will come from moving groups ofwomen formerly marginalized by their race, economic and social positions, age, sub-region, ethnicity, etc. into the "main story" of the region. Much of the tenor of Women oftheAmerican South is set in essays by Pippa HoIloway , Timothy Lockley, James Taylor Carson and Alice Taylor-Colbert, which are tentative reflections on the dearth of sources and how little we know about lesbians, poor white...