Sex, Race, Gender and Power: Southern Rhodesia and the American South

Abstract

Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia is a richly researched analysis of Black Peril laws passed in early twentieth-century Southern Rhodesia to combat the perceived danger of native black men raping white women. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era synthesizes the best recent scholarship on the lives of American black and white southern women in the nineteenth century. Although these are two different kinds of histories, they have much in common. Most notably, each grapples with the complex interconnections among race, gender, sex, and power. In white-dominated societies, although black and white women shared a lack of power due to their gender, racial difference almost always overrode their similar status. White women had a stake in racism and saw no possibility for power in joining forces with even more powerless black women. Jock McCulloch and Laura Edwards complicate this intricate story by exploring how women, regardless of race and despite their lack of legal, economic, or political power, shaped society. African women who migrated from village to town, white women who brought attention to white men's sexual relations across the color line, women who left husbands and went to court over domestic abuse—all find a voice in these two excellent books.