Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation, and: Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (review)

Historians studying elite young men and women in the early republic South have often fallen victim to employing southern stereotypes in approaching their topics: Men are studied as creatures of honor who live and die by the sword to defend their reputation, while women are presented as one-dimensional southern belles. These studies have provided interesting insights on the meanings of manhood and womanhood in this time period, but they have been criticized for being too restrictive. A new crop of historians is more interested in studying southern men and women on their own terms, as incomplete identities who were always changing, always negotiating and transforming themselves toward a more perfect version of a gendered ideal.

Two such historians, Anya Jabour and Lorri Glover, take issue with earlier approaches and make good on taking earlier historians to task by studying manhood and womanhood not as static categories of analysis, but as goals toward which young men and women labored in processes that over time shaped and reshaped the definitions of gender. In Southern Sons, Glover studies the ideal of manhood to which elite young men between the 1790s and the 1820s aspired. Glover finds fault with previous studies that posited honor as the central theme in understanding young southern men. Instead, she argues that honor is merely a single component of manhood, and that manhood was the culmination of a process that young boys navigated and negotiated in the early republic. Jabour's Scarlett's Sisters traces the lifelong self-fashioning process of womanhood through which coming-of-age women adopted racial, regional, and gender identities. Jabour's "ladies-in-training" rebelled against and resisted society's patriarchal prescriptions and promoted female agency. Both books trace the processes through which elite men and women experienced life stages: youth, adolescence, courtship, adulthood, and the shakeup of the status quo with the coming of the Civil War.

While young men and women faced different challenges, both genders exhibited a sense of rebelliousness and questioned authority throughout their journeys of self-definition. Elite families trained their young sons to exhibit an independent nature and a spirit of autonomy. The goal for these youths was to attain what Glover terms "manly independence," a balance between deference to social expectations and an autonomous spirit, and the young men in Southern Sons display that independent spirit extensively. But families who sought to rein in those sons who showed too much independence never ruled these young men with heavy hands. Instead, parents negotiated authority and left good and proper behavior up to their sons. Glover cites many rich examples of parents seeking to coax sons toward good behavior rather than compel them. This type of parenting helped to spur young men toward manhood while nurturing a constant questioning of authority. As a result, we read about young men who exhibited a lifelong negotiation with authority, with society's expectations, with one another, and eventually with the North.

Young women on the other hand were expected to embody self-denial, to revel in the pleasing of others, and, in that pleasing, to find personal happiness. But in these expectations for young women, Jabour still finds room for a rebellious nature and individual agency. Young southern women did not display an outward streak of resistance, but in their own way, in what Jabour terms a "safely invisible" manner, they resisted patriarchal notions of womanhood by extending each stage of their lives and avoiding responsibilities they were not ready to face (13). For example, young women who feared the birthing process, and in the early nineteenth century there was much to fear indeed, resisted motherhood and prolonged their single lives. The life stage of engagement allowed women their final opportunity for holding out for true...