Southern Lady Research Articles

Angels in the Home

Following the Civil War, the wealthy plantation owner Adelicia Acklen redecorated her villa, Belmont, near Nashville, Tennessee, with white marble ideal sculptures by the American sculptors Randolph Rogers, Chauncey Ives, Joseph Mozier, and William Rinehart. During the war, Acklen had compromised her reputation as a genteel Southern lady by bargaining with Union officers in order to sell her cotton at exorbitant wartime rates. By purchasing and displaying a collection of statues that embodied the ideal of true womanhood, Acklen hoped to publicly redomesticate both her home and herself and to express her affinity for the ideology of the Lost Cause.

Where She's From: The Mystery of the Making Place

Where She's From:The Mystery of the Making Place Kathy L. May (bio) George Ella Lyon's family tells her that she talked before she walked. She was "a wordful child." Now a prolific writer in a number of genres and one of Kentucky's most important and widely-recognized authors, Lyon has published thirty-eight books for children and adults. Much of her work draws on family stories, her life in Kentucky, and her engagement with issues important to the region and the world. Lyon was born in 1949 and grew up in far southeastern Kentucky, just outside the small city of Harlan. There she was surrounded by both immediate and extended family who nourished her with love, books, music, and stories told around kitchen and dining room tables. Both sets of grandparents lived in Harlan, and for Lyon they "loomed large as the mountains." Her maternal grandfather, J. D. Fowler, called "Papa Dave," was a lumberman who owned a succession of saw mills in eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee. He was well-read and a member of the Speakers' Club. George Ella's mother went to thirteen schools between first grade and high school graduation because the family moved "wherever there was a boundary of timber to cut." At George Ella's mother's wedding, Papa Dave cut mountain laurel and helped arrange it. Lyon's picture book ABCedar: An Alphabet of Trees is dedicated to this grandfather. Her paternal grandfather, Robert Hoskins, Sr., was a builder. He started out as a coal miner but hated it. So instead, he built houses for miners. Eventually he built many houses in Harlan. His only contract was a handshake, and he could finish a job "with nothing left over but sawdust and a handful of nails." Lyon's picture book, A Regular Rolling Noah, is based on a true story about this grandfather. Both grandmothers, good cooks and meticulous housekeepers, had strong personalities and were influential in young George Ella's life. Grandmother Fowler was a southern lady born in Arkansas and raised in Tennessee. She gave her granddaughter "lady lessons: how to examine your fingernails … or check the heel of your shoe." Lyon's picture book Basket is based on an incident in Grandmother Fowler's life. Grandmother Hoskins was "a puzzle"—sometimes difficult but always fascinating. She was the source of language that stuck in George Ella's head: "blue as a fish hook" [End Page 13] and "the hind end of bad luck." It was Grandmother Hoskins who uttered the phrase, "It'll come a tide," when the Cumberland River was nearing flood stage. This phrase inspired and became the title for one of Lyon's best-known picture books, Come a Tide. Her father, Robert Hoskins, Jr., owned a dry-cleaning store and her mother Gladys Fowler Hoskins stayed at home until George Ella was twelve. Her father was the first person in his family to graduate from college, and her mother started at Berea College but had to drop out to help her family after a sister's death. George Ella's older brother, Robert Hoskins III, was born in 1942. They lived in the house her grandfather Hoskins had built, which had a special room for books where Lyon played with the volumes before she could read. Young George Ella, named for her mother's brother George and her mother's sister Ella, was also nourished by trips outside the region, which fired her imagination and increased her hunger for language. In her autobiography, A Wordful Child, she tells of a trip to San Francisco and being fascinated by the name of the Pickwick Hotel. It's easy to see how rhyme and repetition in the word "Pickwick" would intrigue and amuse a bright child. She began writing poems in elementary school. On her website, she writes that she loved school and all things associated with it—"pencils and paper, all those books, kids to play with, colored chalk, teachers, recess, something new every day." She loved reading even though she had inherited double vision from her father, which made schoolwork something of a struggle. Surgery at age thirteen corrected the problem. Looking...

Professor Lee Robins

Lee was born in New Orleans on 29 August 1922 and throughout her life she retained the warmth and hospitality of gracious, elegant Southern ladies at their best. She received her academic education at Radcliffe College and Harvard University where her already outstanding intellectual skills were

The Uncompromising Diary of Sallie McNeill, 1858-1867 (review)

540Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril cause. He largely ignored the first year of the war, choosing instead to focus on his business interests. In 1862, however, he grudginglyjoined Spaight's Eleventh Battalion, which later became the 21st Texas Infantry. Duncan, a natural leader and widely respected among the men in his unit, was eventually elected an officer. The vast majority of the book covers Duncan's Civil War years and highlights many important themes central to Civil War history: the uncertainty of enlistment and service, morale, national identification, defeat, and life after the conflict. The lengthy depiction of Duncan's Civil War experience presents a refreshing departure from the many narratives that tend to emphasize glory won on large batdefields, grand campaigns, and larger-than-life leaders. Rather, the reader is offered a glimpse into the war's often-forgotten underside: messy camps, miserable garrison duty, monotonous drills, and general distaste for war. More importandy, though, Duncan's service along the Texas Gulf Coast and in southwestern Louisiana reflects the book's central theme. He endured severe bouts of low morale and thus wavered constandy in his dedication to the Confederate cause. The lack ofmilitary activity, in addition to feelings ofuselessness and time boringly wasted, sapped any energy Duncan might have directed toward the war effort. Civil War historiography rarely highlights these emotions as central elements of the Confederate experience. Caudill, however, embraces the opportunity to reveal the deep-seated and negative sentiments expressed so candidly in Duncan's diaries. Caudill's contribution is undoubtedly welcome, yet he seems to translate Duncan's brand of sour morale into an answer for the Confederacy's defeat. By adopting the outmoded "loss-of-will" thesis, seemingly based on the sentiments of one individual's diary entries, Caudill concludes that "Southern unity in support of the Confederacy was in widespread disintegration by 1863" (44). Moreover, he maintains that a "consensus" exists among Civil War historians who argue that Confederate morale peaked at the beginning of the conflict and diminished consistently thereafter until the surrender. These interpretations neglect the significance of recent scholarship from William A. Blair, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Gary W. Gallagher, James M. McPherson, and Jason Phillips who collectively submit that Confederates possessed the will to win despite low morale, disgust widi the Confederate government, or battlefield reverses. Duncan's instantaneous and war-wearied sentiments were clearly sincere and exposed the nature of service in a Trans-Mississippi backwater. However, they hardly reflected the totality of the Confederate military experience and did not accurately reveal the causes for Confederate defeat. Thus it is questionable to use an individual who was not necessarily representative of the Southern war effort in order to endorse a mode of analysis that has been successfully displaced by recent literature. Rice UniversityAndrew F. Lang The UncompromisingDiary ofSallieMcNeill, 1858-186·]. Edited with an introduction by Ginny McNeill Raska and Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009. Pp. 214. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography , index. ISBN 9781603440875, $32.50 cloth.) 2?? o Book Reviews541 By revealing the inner world of Sallie McNeill, a young woman of the planter class living in Brazoria County, Texas, this diary provides rich insights into life in south central Texas in the turbulent years surrounding the Civil War. This watershed event and the South's ultimate defeat prompted Sallie to write, "Slowly, we are awakening from die feeling of utter despair, which overwhelmed all classes, upon receipt of the 'news' of the fall of the Confederacy" (125). For the South (and Texas specifically) , in the span of a few short years, everything had changed. In addition to insights on the war and its aftermath, this diary is especially valuable in exposing the often-unexplored world, or "terra incognita," of a young woman who described herself as "not remarkable for anything" (1). On the contrary, Sallie 's diary is an indispensible resource for those interested in the gender and class dynamics present in the Old South, including both the opportunities and limitations afforded young elite woman during this period. In their brief introduction, Raska and Hill describe Sallie as both a typical and atypical Southern lady. According to the editors, Sallie held typical attitudes on slavery...

Red Moon at Sharpsburg (review)

Reviewed by: Red Moon at Sharpsburg Elizabeth Bush Wells, Rosemary Red Moon at Sharpsburg. Viking, 2007236p ISBN 0-670-03638-2$16.99 R Gr. 6-9 India Moody enters her teens just as the Civil War destroys the peace within her Appalachian Virginia community. Her family's connection with the wealthy Trimble family, though, will prove to be a lifeline to the young woman. Their son Emory, too asthmatic to enlist in the Army of Northern Virginia, is engaged to tutor India; she soon brushes aside the intended lessons in Scripture and household economics and pressures him into teaching her about his own interests in medical sciences, particularly in the battle against infection. She's a promising pupil, and although her parents are decidedly skeptical about the value of this eccentric education, they don't forbid it, tacitly acknowledging that their daughter simply cannot conform to the role of genteel Southern lady. Moreover, India's friend Julia, who has moved to Ohio to escape the coming battles, writes to her about women who enroll at Oberlin College and pay their tuition through work programs, which now brings India's dreams into the realm of possibility. But although the war has in some ways enabled India to imagine a life for herself (and quite possibly with Emory) outside the norm, it also puts all plans on hold as her father loses his life to camp fever, her mother is forced upon the cold charity of relatives, and the treachery of jealous neighbors threatens to bring down the Trimbles and all who come under their protection. This is no run-of-the-mill tale of a feisty, anachronistic feminist but rather an exploration of a pivotal moment in history when the unthinkable becomes the possible—understanding the connection between microorganisms and infection will push medical practice forward, and opening higher education to women will offer life options to marginalized young women like India. Historical fiction fans will therefore embrace this finely crafted coming-of-age tale. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview

Part I. Cradled in the Storms of Revolution: 1. 'That Terrible Tragedy' 2. The age of revolution through slaveholding eyes 3. 'The Purest Sons of Freedom' Entr'Acte: the bonds of slavery Part II. The Inescapable Past: 4. History as moral and political instruction 5. The slaveholders' quest for a history of the common people 6. World history and the politics of slavery 7. History as the story of freedom Part III. Ancient Legacies, Medieval Sensibility, Modern Men: 8. In the shadow of antiquity 9. Coming to terms with the Middle Ages 10. The chivalry 11. Chivalric slave masters 12. Chivalric politics: Southern ladies take their stand Part IV. A Christian People Defend the Faith: 13. A Christian people 14. Unity and diversity among the faithful 15. War over the Good Book 16. Slavery: proceeding from the Lord 17. The Holy Spirit in the word of God 18. Jerusalem and Athens - against Paris 19. Serpent in the garden: liberal theology in the South 20. Theopolitics: golden rule, higher law, and slavery Coda: St. John of Pottawatamie Part V. At the Rubicon: 21. Between individualism and corporatism: from the reformation to the war for Southern Independence 22. Past and future Caesars Epilogue: King Solomon's dilemma.

Live Your Own Life: The Family Papers of Mary Bayard Clarke, 1854-1886

Balancing literary aspiration with gender limitations in the nineteenth-century South; Mary Bayard Clarke (1827-1886) grew up in a North Carolina planter family that revered traditions, but she was not a woman to be stymied by conventional expectations. A writer of ambition and ability, she published poetry and prose, traveled widely, corresponded with prominent men and women of her day, and repeatedly challenged stereotypes of nineteenth-century women. Her writings, letters, and family papers reveal a fiercely independent, creative, and adaptable individual - a woman who seemingly lived several lives in one lifetime and who shattered traditional images of the southern lady along the way. Gathered in this volume, Clarke's papers offer a wealth of revisionist insights as they tell the life story of a remarkable woman. The value of these writings lies in the broad range of themes and locales they cover. Clarke traveled to Cuba, New York, and Chicago; spent five arduous years on the frontier in San Antonio; and in 1861, against her husband's wishes, returned to North Carolina, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her writings reflect her wit, love of adventure, and keen powers of observation. They also portray her independence as she shouldered economic hardships, household responsibilities, ill health, and extended separations from her husband. Clarke's reaction to the Civil War and its aftermath provides particularly interesting reading. During the war Clarke wrote in support of the Southern cause and sold poetry and newspaper articles to augment the family income. After Appomattox, she published scathing indictments of Radical Reconstruction. When Clarke's husband joined the Republican Party in 1868, her family, and probably Clarke herself, was shocked. Letters from family members reveal the depth of their anger, and Clarke's own words illustrate the difficulties of living as the spouse of a Scalawag in the Reconstruction South.

Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsJoan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930Kathryn M. SilvaKathryn M. Silva Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 92, Number 2Spring 2007 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv92n2p300 Views: 9Total views on this site Copyright ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

REBECCA S. MONTGOMERY. The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890-1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006. Pp. 263. $49.95

Education was one of the Progressive reforms that successfully took root in the South after the turn of the century. To explain this, historians have offered various arguments, including evidence that white southerners sought to match African American efforts at education or to improve the educational level of whites for industrialization in the New South. Rebecca S. Montgomery adds to these explanations by arguing that white women were central to the fight for public education because of their desire to gain personal freedom through education, shift power relations within the household, and expand their economic opportunities. Following the Civil War, southern white women, predominantly middle-class women, identified public education as a means for political agency and self-determination. They sought public employment for white women as teachers, which would create new economic opportunities for women following the war. In addition, women's organizations formed, such as the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), and the Georgia School Improvement Club (GSIC). As these organizations pushed for improvements in public education, women countered the image of the dependent southern lady shaping a gendered political culture that still preserved southern traditions such as evangelical Protestantism, white supremacy, and states' rights.

Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (review)

Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (review)

The ambivalent art of Katherine Anne Porter

An acclaimed American writer confronts issues of gender in her work and life. During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter's shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included Victorian attitudes of grandmother who raised her; sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and conservative, ordered attitudes of Agrarians. Throughout Porter's long career, writes Titus, she repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman's maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence. Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter's gender-thinking - her sustained examination of interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from essential identity of woman as the repository of life, as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter's fiction, as well as vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.

William Faulkner's legacy: "what shadow, what stain, what mark"

This fresh approach to Faulkner's canon examines his fiction in relation to other writers of the South whose works echo but also supplement, revise, respond to, and even correct his depictions of the South. Whether working at the same time or two generations after Faulkner, these writers tackle similar issues - the liberal white male, the southern lady, African-Americans, and the nonaristocrat. From Ellen Glasgow and Zora Neale Hurston to Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, and new writers like Elizabeth Dewberry and Tim Gautreaux, many southern writers have used the same tropes, plots, and archetypes as Faulkner, to different effect. Margaret Bauer argues that they seem to have understood more quickly than the critics that Faulkner was only one voice of one part of the South and that there were more stories to tell and more people who could tell them. Using a variety of critical techniques, Bauer offers a new avenue toward understanding the literary response to southern history. Among the most important contributions of this book is its re-examination of Faulkner's white male liberal prototype, who feels powerless to effect change and relieve the oppression of African-Americans and women in the South. Viewing such a character from the point of view of the oppressed illuminates the cowardice of these privileged men, who were previously lauded for their liberal consciousness or sympathized with for their frustration over their impotence. Bauer also offers a thorough reading of the main body of Ernest Gaines's canon.

Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930

Joan Marie Johnson has brought a new angle of vision to bear on southern women of the early twentieth century. While historians such as Anne Firor Scott, Elizabeth Hayes Turner, and Marsha Wedell have explored women's organizations in southern cities, Johnson uses clubwomen within the towns and cities of South Carolina as a laboratory for focusing on the construction and meanings of southern identity for white and African American women. What emerges is a dual history of two parallel yet separate umbrella groups, the state's Federation of Women's Clubs (SCFWC) and its African American counterpart, the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (scfcwc). To be sure, both groups of clubwomen came from elite backgrounds and showed a literary bent—they read books and presented reports. Yet Johnson's exploration emphasizes the differences in their identity and group experiences. Claiming that white elite women saw their southern identity linked to the Lost Cause, the author stresses the overlapping membership of white women's clubs and the local chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Here her primary examples are Louisa and Mary Poppenheim, wealthy Vassar-educated sisters in Charleston who belonged to both organizations.

Saving Southern History in Caroline Gordon's Penhally

In the half-century following the Civil War, affluent white southern women realized that they had a view of gender conventions which no longer merged seamlessly with that of white southern men. As Anne Goodwyn Jones notes, this meant that, [c]aught between white supremacy and inferiority, for the first time their to [their] race might well conflict with [their] loyalties to [their] sex (24). Postbellum upper-middle and upper-class white southern women gradually became aware, on an unprecedented scale, not only of their as female in terms closer to those employed by bourgeois New Women of the North, but also that they confronted a cultural image of themselves that served someone else's needs (Jones 25) rather than their own. And the spirit of innovation and challenge to old mores particular to the early twentieth century helped clear the path for many women to explore that feminine image in more critical terms than they had ever been able to do before. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw argues that a significant element of the historical consciousness which helps characterize the writers of the Southern Renaissance is the to understand and to terms with the dominating image of the (74). For upper-middle and upper-class white southern women writers in particular, the image of the southern lady was an entity which had to be examined in order for each of them to be able to situate herself as a person in history, ... who has been shaped by images and myths she only partly apprehends and controls, and, at last, who in her turn will be ... a shaper of myths to come (Prenshaw 83). Like their male contemporaries, many white southern women writers sought both a personal and a cultural identity in the stuff of southern history, and although some of them fundamentally were in sympathy with Agrarian assumptions, many times they perceived the Civil War, the loss of the Old Order, and the fallout of southern defeat somewhat differently in both cultural and personal terms. The material history they examined, the imaginative perspective from which they viewed it, and the literary and cultural conclusions they drew often differed radically from what has to be perceived as the quintessential Southern Renaissance confrontation between old and new. At the core of this difference in approach lay a fundamental breach between how white men and women perceived the downfall of that culture in the first place: male writers and critics often have tended to see the advent of the southern tragedy in a single, abrupt moment of apocalypse that changed their region forever and produced an inertia that made them backward-looking and loyally adherent to the old ways. In contrast, women writers more often have perceived southern history as an unfocused, unproductive clinging to a social order continually crumbling away, which prevented anyone from prospering--intellectually, spiritually, and often materially. For many white southern women writers, the conflict between old and new has been double-edged. The Civil War set in motion a drawn out, often uncomfortable process of remaking personal as well as regional identity, which demanded setting aside the old assumptions and treading on unfamiliar territory; but in addition-what might be the real crux of the tragedy for white women--this meant a continual fight against masculine cultural nostalgia if women and, ultimately, the South were to forge a viable new sense of self. While affluent white women, too, regretted the loss of their familiar ways of life, finally they could afford to be more forward-looking and optimistic about putting aside the vestiges of the old order than could the men, who felt themselves to have had much more at stake in the plantation system and hence much more to lose with its final demise. Caroline Gordon embraced the opportunity offered by modernism to grapple with remaking white southern feminine identity in the context of values and beliefs inherited from the Old South, along the way confronting the blockade to that effort thrown up by intense masculine nostalgia for the Old Order. …

“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.)

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.

Boundary-Breaking Courage

South History Across the Color Line. By Nell Irvin Painter. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 256 pp. $37.00 cloth; $17.95 paper. South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. By Trudier Harris-Lopez. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. xii + 230 pp. $24.95. Nell Painter's Southern History Across the Color Line and Trudier Harris-Lopez's South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature highlight scholarly careers of originality and complex vision. These texts move beyond traditions of historiography and literary criticism, which often forestall critical wholeness and "down-home" fun, to demonstrate excellence marked by the transgressive verve of two innovative and progressive scholars. In these texts, Painter and Harris-Lopez offer insights beyond the borders of popular critical models. They demonstrate boundary-breaking courage that distinguishes their work from the volumes of often "ordinary" and sometimes-redundant essay collections available today. This two-part review looks at both books, highlighting moments that reveal why the courage and vision found in the best-of-the-best in African American studies shines through most dynamically in these scholars' work. I. Standing in the Breach Nell Painter's journey towards intellectual distinctiveness frames and structures her collection while encouraging a decompartmentalized articulation of American history. Each essay here bypasses tightly defined race, class, and gender categories of exploration, which Painter describes as the "blunt tools of analysis." They bridge "the old habit of writing only [End Page 145] about white people or writing only about black people" with a conscious exploration of "individual subjectivity" and the inter-subjective arrangements of time and place as defined by various patterns of personal and communal growth. Painter investigates class, the body, cultural symbolism, and sexuality from a materialist perspective with many of her interpretations and insights illuminated by what she characterizes as her interdisciplinary "auto-education." "I had to learn a great deal more than what my graduate education had provided," she explains. The thoroughness and thoughtfulness of the essays that result from her self-taught interdisciplinarity inspire and open a conversation about scholarly possibilities and exchange that ultimately reject traditional academic paradigms, particularity those that are "locked-down" by the notion of area specializations. The value of engaging in a versatile and trangressive intellectual exchange among disciplines and among a variety of analytical tools is evident in the opening chapter. "Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting" is one of Painter's best essays. In it she asks readers to sojourn with her into the painful psychology and body politics of slavery. It is an extremely successful attempt to move with intellectual rigor and consistency toward a meaningful interpretation of a world mapped in blood by cruelty and violence. While crossing analytical racial boundaries as well as violating class and gender sectioning, Painter engages feminist and "social science scholarship on child abuse and other forms of torture," psychology, and African American literary studies in her broad, interpersonal view of the wounds and perpetual assaults of slavery and its legacies. Painter's methodological chronicle and challenge continues in essays focusing on the life, individual development and "auto-education" of two southern activists whose personal identities and psyches were affected deeply by the race and gender politics of their time, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and Hosea Hudson. Painter reveals how each adjusted to personal realities couched within worlds and ideologies that molded their lives broadly and, sometimes, in unexpected and dramatic ways. For Hosea Hudson struggling for the civil rights of slave descendents and other minorities during the mid-twentieth century carried him from sharecropper to popularity as an organic intellectual (one who "educated himself out of the thrall of conventional thinking"). On the other hand, Painter's discussion of Gertrude Thomas reveals how this southern lady's [End Page 146] formal education fell short of providing what she needed to survive a change in circumstances brought about by the end of the Civil War. Painter's collection is consistent in its concern for...

Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era

While playing the southern lady for the white political establishment, thousands of mostly middle-class, middle-aged, married white women become grassroots activists in America's civil rights movement, sometimes at the cost of friendships, status, economic security, and family support. The original essays in this collection tell who these women were, why they became committed to racial justice and equal opportunity, and how they organized to change southern society. The women worked within a range of national and local Institutions, both segregated and biracial. Their stories, largely unknown, span most of the 20th century from the New Deal to the early 1970s and took place across the South from Louisville to New Orleans. In the ongoing struggle for human dignity and voice in American life, this book adds a new and necessary dimension to our understanding of both biracial activism and white anti-racism.

Elizabeth R. Varon. <italic>Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy</italic>. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 317. $30.00

Elizabeth R. Varon. Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 317. $30.00 Get access Varon Elizabeth R.. Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 317. $30.00. Jane Turner Censer Jane Turner Censer George Mason University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 5, December 2004, Pages 1572–1573, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.5.1572 Published: 01 December 2004

Reviews of Books:Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy Elizabeth R. Varon

Reviews of Books:Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy Elizabeth R. Varon

Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South

2004 Winner of the Cawelti Award Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined Tara McPherson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Tara McPherson begins Reconstructing Dixie with this observation: is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is fixed geographic space below the Mason-Dixon line (1). This huge, grandly conceived book is an investigation of the multiple stones told and retold about the using the social constructs of nostalgia, gender, and race. It is fitting, then, that McPherson begins narrative with a short autobiographical story that locates as a southern expatriate living in Los Angeles. With this statement of self-disclosure, the author breaks out of the hermetic space of scholarly writing to acknowledge that there is no such thing as the objective scholar. McPherson's story establishes right to deconstruct and reconstruct the as an insider who has both the authority to tell a southern story, and is deeply implicated in it. Thus, while McPherson's book is a complex and multilayered study of the many narratives of the South, it is written from within and is by perforce her story. In order to demonstrate how the grand narrative of the mythic can be both fixed and unfixed, McPherson avoids the standard narratives of the (such as William Faulkner) to introduce a refreshingly eclectic range of stories taken from fiction, film, television, journalism, the tourist industry, the Internet, autobiography, and the field of Southern studies. She examines a number of fixed stories in which the South and the New South are narrated as stones of nostalgia, guilt, and race, in which flat unidimensional characters such as the southern belle, the southern lady, the southern gentleman, and even the happy slave are presented as immutable. She explores a number of other stories in which the characters are more ambivalent, unfixed, mutable, and complex. McPherson's goal is to display the concept of lenticular (McPherson's term for a bifurcated vision in which two separate images are superimposed but can only be perceived separately and in opposition), and then to complicate and dislodge these oppositional perceptions by suggesting that nostalgia, gender, and race must be perceived as integral parts of a shared continuum of knowledge and belief. In chapter one, McPherson explores the female narrative of the Old through the constructs of the southern belle or southern lady, and the southern black female as inverse. In analysis of Margaret MitchelPs Gone with the Wind and its doubly fictional sequel, Scarlett, McPherson introduces Scarlett O'Hara as the archetypal southern belle, a shapely coquette, whose highly polished beauty and femininity, genteel behavior, and gracious hospitality are set in the center (or on the porch) of a grand plantation house, which in its turn is embedded in the mythic Southern land. The southern lady is also characterized as both gracious and fragile, but she is also, like Scarlett, tough and enduring (to rule over plantations when the men are away), and one with the land (to which Scarlett inevitably returns for succor). Mitchell's plantation is a female and feminized world in which southern gentlemen (the abstracted protectors of white women) are often physically and metaphorically absent. The ties of the southern belle and lady to the plantation (home) and land (place) are thus rendered natural, and by extension, real. Mitchell's (and McPherson's) description of Mammy is the inverse of Scarlett, black opposite. In comparison to Scarlett's shapely form and kittenish character, Mammy's body is described as huge, old, shapeless, and unsexed, ruined by hard physical labor. She is caricatured as a happy slave whose loyalty to and protection of mistress is absolute and therefore also natural. In Scarlett, Mammy (and race) are expunged by Mammy's death. …