Manners and Southern History (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 156 of the self-sacrificing daughter who exchanged frivolities associated with teenage girls for a life of war work and material hardships in the name of southern independence” (p. 135). Confederate Daughters is a pathbreaking study, contributing to our understanding of Confederate nationalism as well as our conception of the Civil War as a coming-of-age experience. “The story of young women told in this book illuminates how age and gender shaped support for the Confederacy,” both during and after the war (p. 166). JENNIFER L. GROSS Jacksonville State University Manners and Southern History. Edited by Ted Ownby. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xiv, 169 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-57806-979-8. The six papers in this slim volume began as contributions to the annual Porter Fortune Symposium at the University of Mississippi; organizer Ted Ownby invited scholars to consider manners “broadly and with an eye toward connecting manners to issues central to southern history” (p. vii). All contributors focused to some extent on manners and race, and many discussed gender conventions as well. The edited book also includes useful scholarly comments on the six essays offered by historians Jane Dailey and John Kasson. Anya Jabour examined the effects of the Civil War on the ideal of the southern belle. Knowing and practicing good manners meant displaying traits of soft-spoken submissiveness and never flashing high temper; demure deference was the essential element of the proper southern lady on the eve of the Civil War. Paradoxically, the heightened passions excited by the sectional conflict became an excuse to deviate from an ideal that had required suppressing so many feelings; expressing frustration and rage at Yankee troops allowed young southern women “an appropriate outlet for previously unacceptable anger” (p. 9). Jabour found heated comments in girls’ diaries and correspondence. Wrote one, hearing of Yankee casualties, “How I rejoice to think of any of them being killed. . . . If only the whole army could have been roasted alive!” (p. 10). They recorded unladylike displays of defiance, energetically sassing Union soldiers and waving the Confederate banner at them. Ironically, for young southern women, defending the Confederacy meant choosing between “their identity as ladies and their identity as rebels” (p. 2). Jennifer Ritterhouse, in “The Etiquette of Race Relations in the Jim Crow South,” discusses white efforts to establish codes of postemancipa- A P R I L 2 0 0 9 157 tion conduct for freedpeople. Requiring public deference of one race served to signify the dominance of the other and was seen as a necessity for white honor in a world without slavery. Ritterhouse’s examination of southern autobiographies yielded a plethora of examples of the nuances of racial etiquette and allowed her to conclude that the code was never monolithic but always riddled with exceptions. She traces change over time and provides a historiographic element to her discussion as well. Charles F. Robinson’s focus on antimiscegenation laws in the South reveals their uneven, sporadic enforcement. In his essay “What’s Sex Got to Do With It?” he concludes that what the white South sought was less to prevent interracial sexual encounters than to outlaw behavior indicative of meaningful relationships and emotional intimacy between men and women of different races; he shows convincingly that selective enforcement of laws frequently allowed casual, opportunistic sexual encounters to go unregulated. Joseph Crespino’s “Civilities and Civil Rights in Mississippi” examines the varied responses of Mississippi whites to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Many paternalistic leaders hoped to maintain a level of civility and decorum even as they resisted desegregation, reasoning that overt hostility and especially violence would attract unwanted outside attention ; they believed that they could gently control black community leaders . Dismayed by the confrontational stance of the Citizens’ Councils and shocked at the militancy of local blacks, the self-styled “good white people” of the state found their manners irrelevant and themselves inadequate to the task of managing history. Of particular interest to Alabamians will be Lisa Lindquist Dorr’s lively exploration of college youth culture in Alabama between 1913 and...