Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women (review)

Abstract

Reviews115 wandered the world in quest of a place where he could restore the traditions of his southem Troy. Having ceased his explorations, he finally came home to the South to live in old age. He died in 1979 and was buried in his beloved Sewanee. His last poetic lines from "The Buried Lake" indicate how his faith had given him some degree of peace. Light choir upon my shoulder, speaking Dove, The dream is over and the dark expired. I knew that I had known enduring love. Only Caroline Gordon now remained of this remarkable foursome. In her final years Caroline taught at the University of Dallas where, ever faithful, she anchored her teaching in Maritain's philosophy. She carried on a lively correspondence with Jacques until his death in 1973. In her old age Caroline remembered, "I always told Jacques that I followed—if remotely—in his wake." This last fugitive and exile died in Mexico in 1981, aged eighty-six. The epigraph she chose for her 1956 novel, The Malefactors, came from Jacques. It appears on her tombstone: "It is for Adam to interpret the voices that Eve hears." John Dunaway's skillful editing of the Tate-Maritain correspondence is a graceful tribute to the remarkable friendship of four gifted individuals who were at the heart of the cultural revival of their native lands —lands from which all were, in their separate ways, exiles and fugitives. Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women. Edited by Anne Firor Scott. University Press of Virginia, 1993. 199 pp. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $12.95. Reviewed byJacqueline Jones, professor ofhistory atBrandeis University. She is author ofThe Dispossessed : America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present. Her newproject is a hhtory ofthe social division oflabor in America from 1600 to thepresent. Unheard Voices introduces five pioneering scholars of the history of southern women to a modem audience, with essays (originally published between 1928 and 1941) by Virginia Gearhart Gray (1903-71), Marjorie Stratford Mendenhall (1900-1961), Julia Cherry Spruill (1899-1986), Guion Griffis Johnson (1900-1989), and Eleanor M. Boatwright (1895-1950). Anne Firor Scott's introduction places their work and personal lives in a larger context, one framed by the struggle of an early-twentieth-century generation of women historians to make a significant contribution to scholarship. All five writers produced impressive monographs in the then undefined field of women's history, but none received commensurate formal recognition from her colleagues or the profession in general during their most productive years. Only Julia Cherry Spruill lived to see later historians acknowledge and appreciate the significance of her work, beginning in the early 1970s. And so the irony noted in the book's title: against great odds, each woman managed to find her own voice, only to realize that, for the most part, her contemporaries were not listening. Included in the book are Gray's "Activities of Southern Women: 1840-1860," Mendenhall's "Southern Women of a 'Lost Generation'" (the decades immediately following the Civil War), Spruill's "Conjugal Felicity and Domestic Discord," Johnson's "Family Life," and Boatwright's "The Political and Civil Status of Women in Georgia, 1783-1860." 116Southern Cultures In her introductory essay, entitled "A Different View of Southern History," Scott notes the difficulties all of these women had to overcome in order to research, publish, and teach in the field of southern history. The five followed different career paths. Gearhart received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1928. Scott considers her dissertation "the first scholarly effort ever made to survey the life and work of antebellum southern women." Gearhart married, had three children, and later in her life became a library curator at Duke University, where her husband (a zoologist) was a professor. Mendenhall completed her dissertation, "A History of Agriculture in South Carolina, 1790-1860," at the University of North Carolina in 1939. She married a widower in 1942 (he died three years later) and continued to do historical research while teaching introductory political science at UNC. Spruill wrote her pathbreaking Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies as a research assistant at UNCs Institute for Research in...