Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change (review)

Abstract

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7 57 America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (New York, 2002). McRae’s post-Olympic Owens is a tragic figure, more brutally affected by the limitations of racism. It should be noted for readers of this journal that there is little that is southern about Owens. He lived in Alabama for ten years, which the book addresses in a mere sixteen pages. Although Owens regularly emphasized his Alabama sharecropping roots in speeches, highlighting his ascent from southern poverty, there is nothing particularly southern about the adult Owens. Baker’s book is still the best biography of Jesse Owens. Scholars of African American and sport history should be pleased by its return to print. JOSEPH M. TURRINI Auburn University Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change. Edited by Angela Boswell and Judith N. McArthur. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 280 pp. $44.95. ISBN 0-8262-1617-X. Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change is a new collection of extended conference papers and essays that explores the shift in the historiography of southern women. The latest installment in the University of Missouri Press’s Southern Women Series, it will probably be of more interest to scholars familiar with the historiographical shifts than to general readers. The topics in the series—“boundaries, hidden histories, image and convention, searching for place, and taking off the gloves”—all reveal the growing imperative for women’s historians to move beyond the once ground-breaking (but now clichéd) approach that conveniently sorted women’s experience into one of two categories: public or private. This approach, while useful, tended to artificially divide women’s lives and to use a traditional masculine conception of space and function as the de facto definition of public and private. Originally presented as papers at the 2003 Southern Conference on Women’s History, almost all of the essays in this anthology challenge that old dichotomy, but they do so by suggesting, if not inventing, a new one: active participant or passive resistor. Phillip Hamilton’s essay suggests deftly that wives’ roles in household decisions were public and not simply private choices. Because a family’s selection of furnishings, entertainment, and adornment shaped a white T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 58 family’s standing in the community, in the larger hierarchy, and in politics , wives’ input in those matters affected the family’s public persona. Hamilton has chosen to redefine the boundary of public and private in order to illuminate the interrelationship of the two. Jean B. Lee takes a slightly different tack in her discussion of the early efforts to preserve Mount Vernon as a national shrine. She argues that Jane C. Washington was not only attempting to honor George Washington’s legacy, but also to save as a monument something that might unite the North and the South around a common heritage. The article demonstrates the fine and ever-shifting line between public and private. Lee is not arguing that the boundaries were blurred, but for a significant overlap between the two. Only Jacqueline Glass Campbell uses the Civil War as a vehicle for exploring women’s political activities. The politicization of what historians once considered private issues is seen in North Carolina women’s reactions to a new kind of warfare in which the civilian population is also the enemy. Campbell juxtaposes Sherman’s soldiers’ accounts of their march through North Carolina with Carolina women’s accounts of deprivation, attack, and destitution. Traditionally, one would have been tempted to see this as a public record of events held against a private analysis of them or as the northern view versus the southern. However, Campbell calls us to see it as the personal evolving into a community concern. Whether one chooses to accept the accuracy of the soldiers’ or the citizens’ views, war had made the personal political. Campbell’s article clearly delineates women’s intellectual struggle with economic decisions and shows how they attempted to ground those decisions in a morality compatible with their pre-war experiences...