In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003) 140-145



[Access article in PDF]

New Directions in Southern Women's Literary Historiography

Barbara Ladd


The History of Southern Women�s Literature. Edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. xvii + 689 pages. $45.55.

Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks follow their 1995 anthology, SouthernWomen's Writing: Colonial to Contemporary, with a literary history. Much more than a valuable compendium of information on southern women writers from Eliza Lucas Pinckney (writing in the eighteenth century) to Kaye Gibbons, The History of Southern Women's Literature offers its readers new ways to think about southern literary history, challenging conventional periodization, movements, and themes that have come to be generally accepted as defining the field. The "local color" movement of the late nineteenth century, for example, achieves a level of significance in the hands of these essayists that it does not have in traditional histories centered on the work of white male writers. And Perry and Weaks take Carol S. Manning up on the challenge she makes to conventional periodization in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (1993) by establishing the beginning of the Southern Renaissance in 1900, a move that recovers a number of women writers who have been marginalized by conventional male-centered literary histories in which the Southern Renaissance begins after World War I. Later in the volume Linda Tate identifies "a second southern renaissance . . . far more robust and diverse than the first heralded watershed period in southern literary history."

The History tells a story of southern women's changing relationship with the South and with southern ideals of womanhood from the eighteenth century to the present. Like the 1985 History of Southern Literature--from which it takes its overall structure--it is organized into four major sections and features an afterward on "The Future" as well as an appendix on "The Study" [End Page 140] of the literature. It also contains a short bibliography of secondary sources, which The History of Southern Literature does not contain.

Section One, "The Antebellum and Bellum South (Beginnings to 1865)," treats journals and letters, captivity narratives, women's magazines, the novel, Civil War diaries and memoirs, responses of southern women to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the work of African American women writers, and an essay on the gender issues of the day by Mary Louise Weaks, who begins with the colonial (not the antebellum) era with a brief treatment of court records left by southern women who sought to vote, to own property, and to administer farms and plantations. She points out that southern women during the American Revolution often spoke publicly in newspapers and journals about the need to boycott British goods and sought to infiuence the outcome of the war with their writing, and that it was in the early Republic that "the myth of southern womanhood," with its emphasis on submission and silence, was born. According to Karen Manners Smith, southern white women celebrated the ideals of that myth during the antebellum years as essential to the preservation of social order. On the other hand, although black women of the South in this era were also very strongly motivated by what Janell Hobson and Frances Smith Foster describe as "a high and holy mission on the battlefield of existence," it was one quite different from the mission of the southern white woman in that it sought to overturn the slavery-based social order of the South. Individual essays in this section of the History are provided for Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Caroline Howard Gilman, the Grimké sisters, Louisa S. McCord, Caroline Lee Hentz, Harriet Ann Jacobs, and Mary Chesnut; other writers discussed briefiy in the general essays include Mary Chase Barney, Mary Shadd Cary, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, Sarah Josepha Hale, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sue Pettigru King, Maria McIntosh, Adah Isaacs Menken, and E.D.E.N. Southworth. The overall picture that emerges is one of a complex era defined by developing ideas of hierarchy and social place as slavery became more entrenched in the U.S. South...

pdf