“Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities. Ed. by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xii, 323 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2675-X.)

Abstract

Southern women's history is a relatively new field; despite the seeds being planted as early as the 1930s, not until 1970 were those seeds watered with the publication of Anne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics. In the last thirty years the field has thrived and grown into a virtual jungle of varied interpretations, methodologies, and research emphases. With a historiographical introduction by Scott, this collection of fourteen essays on southern women's history reflects the current diversity of this field. Half of these essays approach women's history by focusing on an individual woman. Lucy Byrd's eighteenth-century marriage suffered from a conflict between the emerging companionate ideal and the enduring southern patriarchal ideal in Paula Treckel's essay. Giselle Roberts finds that the unmarried Sarah Morgan faced conflicts of her own as she tried to claim social respectability after the Civil War despite the social stigma and feelings of inferiority attached to women who never marry. Though fraught with difficulties, through marriage women might find power, as did Blanche Butler Ames, the wife of the governor of Reconstruction-era Mississippi, in Warren Ellem's essay.