Entering the Fray: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South ed. by Jonathan Daniel Wells and Sheila R. Phipps (review)

In 1987, American feminist Charlotte Bunch penned the now-famous phrase, "You can't just add women and stir." Instead of simply tacking on a few paragraphs about women to male-dominated historical accounts, Bunch argued that scholars must reshape their understanding of history, giving women's actions and views equal weight to those of men. Entering the Fray demonstrates that analyzing the experiences of women can broaden scholarly knowledge of a variety of topics often underexplored in southern history.

Entering the Fray: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South comprises nine essays by female historians on wide-ranging subjects related to twentieth-century southern women's history, including women's participation in labor unions, foreign missions, politics, and historic preservation, among other causes. All are accessible to a broad readership, though the volume will prove most useful to historians of gender, or as a supplemental text for a graduate or upper-level\ undergraduate course on southern history. As a collection of conference proceedings, however, the volume is not intended to be comprehensive in scope. Some chapters, such as Kelly Minor's "Consumed with a Ghastly Wasting," focus more on social history; others, such as Robin Morris's "Organizing Breadmakers," emphasize political history.

Most chapters focus on white women, though a few highlight African Americans, and others note the significance of their absence from the topic at hand. (Puzzlingly, A. Lee Levert's essay "Playing with Jim Crow," which addresses "children's challenges to segregated recreational space in New Orleans," contains little mention of women. This otherwise fascinating essay would be more at home in a volume on race in the New South.) Rural and lower-income women are each the main focus of only one essay. Much more could be said about these women, whose relative absence from this volume is disproportionate to their significant numbers in the early-twentieth-century South.

Arguably, a few of the essays in Entering the Fray make the case for women's transformative roles in history a bit too broadly. In her discussion of African American women's roles in Memphis's 1959 elections, for example, Elizabeth Gritter sweepingly claims that the women "changed not only the city but also the South," ushering in "a new era" for black Memphians (137). While it is certainly true that women's activism has brought them increased visibility and power, Gritter does not provide ample evidence to support her claims. Similarly, Regina Sullivan glosses over the complexities of the life and legacy of Southern Baptist missionary Lottie Moon as she argues that Moon helped lead a "fight for female power" within the denomination (13).

More helpful are essays that analyze southern women's roles while carefully considering the reality of their historical contexts. In "A Woman's Touch," for example, Megan Stubbendeck explores the way that female historic preservationists at Monticello operated "in the grey area between . . . extremes of staying at home or publicly challenging conservative ideologies" (120). And in one of the book's richest entries, "The 'Modern-Day Medea,'" Keira Williams evaluates how contemporary views of gender, race, class, and politics shaped the media's portrayal of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who ultimately confessed to drowning her sons in 1994.

Overall, Entering the Fray effectively demonstrates how women helped shape a variety of perspectives and movements in the diverse twentieth-century South, including politics, healthcare, suffrage, and homemaking. The book reinforces the importance of gender analysis for an accurate interpretation of southern history. Understanding the South, as this volume demonstrates, is impossible without exploring the experiences and ideas of southern women.