Shrill Hurrrahs: Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865–1900 by Kate Côté Gillin (review)

White women in South Carolina made their loyalties known during the election campaign of 1876, the political contest that marked the end of Reconstruction-era Republican control of southern state governments and the return to power of conservative white elites. In one instance, a newspaper report describing a Democratic Party procession noted the actions of women who leaned out of windows along the march’s path to cheer on male leaders: “From eager lips came shrill hurrahs. . . . Snowy handkerchiefs were waived by hands that never seemed to tire” (94). It is from this quotation—celebrating white women’s endorsement of political leaders associated with the widespread voter intimidation and violence employed to win this election—that Kate Côté Gillin draws the title of her book. Shrill Hurrahs, which explores the history of racial violence in South Carolina from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, joins a growing number of works that place women and gender at the center of the history of this period. In this increasingly crowded field, Gillin’s well-researched book stands out most for its exploration of the key role played by elite white women as supporters, instigators, and at times direct participants in racist political terror.

Gillin presents white-on-black violence over the latter half of the nineteenth century as increasing in organization, brutality, and efficacy. And at each stage of its development, she argues, the violence represented angry white reactions to the Civil War’s disruptions not only of a prior labor regime and racial hierarchy, but also of an antebellum gender order. For example, in chapter 3 Gillin tells the fascinating story of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, the successor to early vigilante efforts. The Klan attained an exceptional level of organization in this state, where it also came under exceptional federal scrutiny. The latter led to widespread indictments, arrests, and some prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts. And this affected gender dynamics within white families, when white male defendants were taken from home just as they had been during the Civil War. White women were left responsible for supporting their families in ways that problematized patriarchal images of female dependence. Similarly, chapter 4 contends that, although the Klan was essentially defeated by federal action, its example of using well-controlled paramilitary organizations to swing elections through voter intimidation was embraced by others and taken to a still higher level of efficacy. Indeed, through such methods, Democrats managed to wrest political control from Republicans in 1876. Nonetheless, Gillin argues, this achievement could not block black men and women’s now occupying what were considered honorable gender roles, nor stop white women from exercising new levels of independence.

The most striking contribution of each of her chapters is Gillin’s exploration of the important role of elite white women as “co-conspirators” in racial violence (100). Gillin describes white women acting at times as assailants but more often as instigators. They exhorted their husbands and sons to follow up on threats that white women made against black workers, and they—often falsely—identified black assailants, leading to violent retribution. Gillin also traces how elite white women depicted Klan tactics in their diaries and memoirs as a legitimate response to black political activity. Finally, South Carolina’s history of extensive Klan prosecutions provides Gillin with evidence of white women organizing to petition for pardons, raise funds for bail, collect supplies for prisoners, and nurse sick inmates. They were the “confessors, advocates, and pillars of strength” that facilitated white male violence (52).

Gillin argues throughout that white women’s roles in violence further “stretched the limits of southern womanhood beyond its old constraints” (77). In this way, she claims, white efforts to restore an antebellum social order resulted instead, ironically, in disrupting gender norms even further and “forever alter[ing...