Alabama Women: Their Lives and Times ed. by Susan Youngblood Ashmore and Lisa Lindquist Dorr (review)

Part of the Southern Women series of the University of Georgia Press, Alabama Women: Their Lives and Times works from the well-established premise that "the experiences of women inflect and shape our overall understanding of the past" (3). As Lisa Lindquist Dorr so eloquently put it in the Introduction, "this collection illuminates the efforts of both the famous and the seemingly insignificant, in the process demonstrating that all lives contribute to the larger historical narrative of the state" (4). While no volume could possibly do justice to the experiences of all Alabama women, the editors did an excellent job of choosing women from a wide variety of historical, racial, and social backgrounds as topics. Moreover, they effectively situate these Alabama women within the larger scope and events of southern, American, and world history.

Not surprisingly, several of the essays deal with race relations, interracial identity, and various aspects of African American life in Alabama. In "The Townsend Family: African American Female 'Voice' and Interracial Ties," Sharony Green explores one interracial family's attempts to carve out a place for themselves in nineteenth-century Alabama. In 1856, Samuel Townsend, a wealthy white Alabamian died. Having never married, Townsend took pains to insure the freedom and well-being of the ten children he fathered by five enslaved women. Green's essay reveals not just the unjust racial environment of the South in which the Townsends operated, but also the power the Townsend women exerted as they maneuvered through their daily lives, enjoyed the advantages of freedom and economic stability provided by Samuel Townsend's will, and carved out a place for themselves as mixed race southerners in the postbellum South.

Harriet Doss's chronicling of enslaved women whose owners sought the medical care of J. Marion Sims for their gynecological afflictions in "Sisterhood of Shared Suffering" adds a new dimension to our understanding of Sims's work from the point of view of his female patients. Doss focuses on three women, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, who suffered from severe incontinence and pain caused by a difficult childbirth. These women's afflictions were horrific enough that they rendered them "useless" to their owners. Not surprisingly, their owners were willing to subject them to Sims's experiments in the hope that they could be returned to health and work. That aspect of the story, owners making decisions for their slaves, is well known. What Doss is careful to show, however, is that these enslaved women were willing to undergo multiple experimental surgeries because of the misery of their condition. Shifting the focus from Sims and the owners, Doss assesses the motivations and agency of Sims's patients. Though she is careful to note that the women's attitude toward Sims and the surgeries is filtered through Sims's perspective, and the women did not give what would be considered "informed consent" today, she also effectively asserts that "the procedures would not have been possible without their acquiescence." Perhaps more importantly, Doss notes that Sims "cured them of a horrific condition that not only caused them tremendous pain but very nearly made them unable to live in human society" (85).

Though there is certainly a tendency to think of the South in terms of black and white, this collection effectively draws the reader's attention to other ethnic and racial identities in Alabama as well. The first essay explores the lives of Creek women during the era of Indian Removal. Acknowledging the difficulties of finding these women in the Eurocentric historical record, Christopher Haveman successfully locates Creek women on both sides of the removal debate and in the changing world (both private and public) of the nineteenth-century South. Most effectively, Haveman illustrates how the Creeks, and Creek women in particular, adapted to the changing world around them on their own terms and for their own reasons...