Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change (review)

Emerging from the Southern Conference on Women’s History (supported by the Southern Association for Women Historians), this volume puts to rest any lingering notions of the passivity of women in the southern United States. Each essay examines lives spent actively shaping their worlds. This focus on activity—the “creating and confronting” in the title—gives the volume its coherence.

Boswell and McArthur’s claim that southern history has often been “recounted from the top down, relying upon political and economic models to explain historical changes,” and directly leading to a focus on elite political, business, and military men, sets up their counterclaim that women also shaped and confronted major events in the South from the ground up (2). For those of us persuaded by the past decades of feminist social history, it feels unfortunate that such a point must still be made. Given the sales of presidential histories, popularity of cable television’s war-strategy shows, and salaries of corporate executives, perhaps it still does. Fortunately, the articles in the collection also offer intriguing theoretical models to refigure the South with such a shift in mind.

Beginning with the Revolutionary era, Philip Hoffman studies elite women left behind by their political office-holding husbands. Running plantations and households, these women forged roles for themselves in the young nation. Some years later, a similarly elite woman played a much larger role than has been recognized in our memories of that young national period. Jean B. Lee recovers Jane C. Washington’s work to preserve Mount Vernon, preparing the first president’s homestead to go to the more studied Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. In one of the most interestingly sourced articles in the volume, Yvonne M. Pitts turns to antebellum wills and probate records in Kentucky. She finds that propertied white women’s efforts to manumit their slaves were often challenged after their deaths on the grounds of insanity. Pitts’s chapter traces how legal definitions of women’s sanity were tied to obeying gender and marriage conventions. Jacqueline Glass Campbell examines white North Carolina women’s reactions to Sherman’s extreme tactics, the anger and frustration that fed later popular Lost Cause ideologies.

While much has been written about Ida B. Wells’s life and antilynching work, Sarah L. Silkey applies a transnational lens to the speeches Wells gave to British audiences in the 1890s and their effect on American opinions. In Virginia, Clayton McClure Brooks finds cooperation between white women who supported segregation and African American female activists. Rather than focusing only on groups advocating integration, McClure Brooks looks at the messy middle ground in which social service took place without consensus on society’s ultimate structure. Sarah Mercer Judson turns to World War I Atlanta to see white and black clubwomen’s responses to the changing city, especially in terms of girls negotiating new public spaces of leisure and war work. Girls appear again in the collection’s final article, Alisa Y. Harrison’s look at 1960s rural Georgia and the thousands of grassroots female activists who formed the majority of its pro-civil rights protestors. In between, contributors Priscilla Dowden-White and Claire Nee Nelson look, respectively, at St. Louis suffrage work and southern influences on the radical activist Louise Thompson Patterson.

Even as Women Shaping the South traces local women’s effects on their respective eras, it is perhaps more useful at introducing a group of scholars pursuing interesting projects. This reviewer would like to have seen a stronger organizing principle or statement of significance beyond the basic social history plea. Yet, I trust the projects from which these articles emerge will give us the richer implications that are missing from this otherwise worthwhile anthology.