Helen Taylor - Women and Dixie: The Feminization of Southern Women's History and Culture - American Literary History 18:4 American Literary History 18.4 (2006) 847-860 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Women and Dixie: The Feminization of Southern Women's History and Culture Reviewed by Helen Taylor Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 By Sarah E. Gardner University of North Carolina Press, 2004 To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886–1910 Edited by Melissa Walker Heidari University of Georgia Press, 2004 Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South By Tara McPherson Duke University Press, 2003 In the early 1980s, when I spent some months raking through the Louisiana State and Tulane University archives reading unpublished materials by southern women writers about the Civil War, I was astonished by the weight of that material and the fact it had rarely been examined. As I completed my own research, Anne Goodwyn Jones published her path-breaking study, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (1981), which charted connections between southern women and began to demonstrate a lineage of their writings which burgeoned around that most significant war. I was also sharing an office with one of the researchers for the mammoth project focused on Mary Boykin Chesnut, led by C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, which resulted in two...