Southern Woman Research Articles

Southern masculinity: perspectives on manhood in the South since Reconstruction

This book covers topics from Cherokee chiefs to womanless weddings. The follow-up to the critically acclaimed collection Southern Manhood: Perspectives on in the Old (Georgia, 2004), Southern Masculinity explores the contours of southern male identity from Reconstruction to the present. Twelve case studies document the changing definitions of southern masculine identity as understood in conjunction with identities based on race, gender, age, sexuality, and geography.After the Civil War, southern men crafted notions of manhood in opposition to northern ideals of masculinity and as counterpoint to southern womanhood. At the same time, manliness in the South - as understood by individuals and within communities - retained and transformed antebellum conceptions of honor and mastery. This collection examines masculinity with respect to Reconstruction, the New South, racism, southern womanhood, the Sunbelt, gay rights, and the rise of the Christian Right. Familiar figures such as Arthur Ashe are investigated from fresh angles, while other essays plumb new areas such as the womanless wedding and Cherokee masculinity.

"One Important Witness": Remembering Lydia Brown in Thomas Dixon's <i>The Clansman</i>

It may seem surprising to begin an essay on Thomas Dixon's 1905 bestseller The Clansman with epigraphs by three female African American authors, contemporaneous with his novel: Anna Julia Cooper, Mrs. N. F. Mosseli, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Surely, many current scholars read plot of The Clansman as simple and racist4 so much so that activist work and political writings of African American women should have no context within Dixon's self-proclaimed accounts of historical enactment of Reconstruction and of the true story of 'Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy/5 Seemingly inspired by racial paranoia that tormented early twentiethcentury America, text prides itself upon narratives of miscegenation and lynching that inspire textual climax: alleged rape of Marion Lenoir by former slave, Gus, and attempted rape of Elsie Stoneman by mulatto activist, Silas Lynch. The story finds its redemption when these miscegenous attempts are thwarted by Ku Klux Klan. As a consequence, story ends with triumphant lynching of Gus and ultimately preservation of southern womanhood. Nonetheless, I begin with these epigraphs because Dixon, as he preserve[s] in this romance both letter and spirit of this remarkable period, seems to engage textually with each.6 Dixon's version of chaos of blind passion that followed Lincoln's assassination is mobilized

Southern women at the seven sister colleges: feminist values and social activism, 1875-1915

This book describes southern womanhood and liberal northern education.From the end of Reconstruction and into the New South era, more than one thousand white southern women attended one of the Seven Sister colleges: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Joan Marie Johnson looks at how such educations - in the North, at some of the country's best schools - influenced southern women to challenge their traditional gender roles and become active in woman suffrage and other social reforms of the Progressive Era South.Attending one of the Seven Sister colleges, Johnson argues, could transform a southern woman indoctrinated in notions of domesticity and dependence into someone with newfound confidence and leadership skills. Many southern students at northern schools imported the values they imbibed at college, returning home to found schools of their own, women's clubs, and woman suffrage associations. At the same time, during college and after graduation, southern women maintained a complicated relationship to home, nurturing their regional identity and remaining loyal to the Confederacy.Johnson explores why students sought a classical, liberal arts education, how they prepared for entrance examinations, and how they felt as southerners on northern campuses. She draws on personal writings, information gleaned from college publications and records, and data on the women's decisions about marriage, work, children, and other life-altering concerns.In their time, the women studied in this book would eventually make up a disproportionately high percentage of the elite southern female leadership. This collective biography highlights their important role in forging new roles for women, especially in social reform, education, and suffrage.

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction Chanté M. Baker (bio) Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. By Gary M. Ciuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. x + 287 pp. $47.50 cloth. Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920 –1945. By Nghana tamu Lewis. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007. xiv + 208 pp. $37.95 cloth. These two recent studies make important contributions to our understanding of noted twentieth-century southern authors and their interrogations of southern culture. While the authors’ scholarly concerns are as varied as the works they investigate, Lewis’s and Ciuba’s projects are linked in that both studies illuminate racial and gendered subtexts underlying the works of selected white southern writers. Entitled to the Pedestal examines five “white women of aristocratic southern heritage”: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. Nghana Lewis insists that a close reading of the authors’ novels, essays, and personal writings reveals their clear engagement with and endorsement of two myths derived from the gendered and racial politics of “Lost Cause” rhetoric: the myth of white [End Page 156] southern womanhood and plantation mythology. Rightly challenging conventional narratives of both myths as “white-male-constructed and -governed,” Lewis says white southern women’s participation in maintaining a staunch Confederate consciousness before, during, and after the Civil War is a “mythic authority” inherited by the women novelists featured. Lewis insists that Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, and Cather’s engagements with myths surrounding southern white womanhood and plantation culture are best understood when examined against the backdrop of modernity. Like their white male counterparts who witnessed and contested national changes in the United States between 1920 and 1945, the writers featured in Lewis’s enlightening study struggle with a “fear of change” and embrace myths endemic to the “Old South” to counter an emerging sociopolitical thrust to further unsettle southern culture and to unseat southern women from their mythic pedestals. Lewis convincingly argues that these women writers challenged the myths as constructs of “idealism and ideology” exclusively, and she insists the novelists espoused those same myths in order to assert varied claims to “authorship and entitlement” at the expense of African Americans and poor whites. She contends that Peterkin’s “patronizing” depictions of African Americans and Bristow’s investment in “mythic notions of womanhood, place, and race,” for example, demonstrate the writers’ implicit engagement with ideas derived from white supremacist ideology. Such ideology also shapes Gordon’s southern white female characters, and it influences the construction of “black racial and poor white class proscriptions” in her work. In her comparative reading of Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Smith’s Strange Fruit, Lewis cogently notes how Smith’s particular belief in “aristocratic white southern women’s public activism” afforded such women the opportunity to enjoy the spoils of mythic white womanhood while at the same time evaluating the very racial structures that enable its existence. Even on the silver screen, as cleverly suggested by the title of Lewis’s final chapter, “old sites of [southern mythic] authority” continue to have cultural currency in movies such as Bringing Down the House (2003). She skillfully demonstrates that a desire to “lay claim to the mythic pedestal upon which southern women have been positioned” and to “indemnify plantation culture” was as prevalent yesterday as it is today. Gary Ciuba joins Lewis in uncovering hidden racial and gendered subtexts in his provocative study Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Heavily influenced by the theoretical positions of [End Page 157] René Girard, Ciuba investigates how the confluence of desire, violence, and divinity results in the “mimetic desire” that he sees appearing explicitly in southern literature. Resulting from this dialectic exchange are scapegoating or “surrogate victimage mechanisms,” which Ciuba reasons are the progeny of “a culture of violence” interacting with “the violence of culture.” He claims the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy illuminate such mechanisms by imagining how desire, violence, and the...

Re-visioning Women and Place

Re-visioning Women and Place Jennifer Rae Greeson (bio) Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. By Katherine Henninger. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. xxii + 256 pages. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty. By Barbara Ladd. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP, 2007. ix + 175 pages. $40.00 cloth. These two books well attest to the fecundity of Patricia Yaeger’s call in Dirt and Desire (2000) for “reconstructed” readings of twentieth-century southern women writers that explode the conventional proscriptions and prescriptions with which such texts have been approached — most particularly by abolishing the segregation of these writers according to race. Both Katherine Henninger and Barbara Ladd have made this project their own, and in so doing they have pushed Yaeger’s revisionist aims forward, finding new critical restrictions and blind spots to overturn. For Henninger, the categorizations to be troubled have to do with discipline and medium: Ordering the Façade insists that we attend to the twentieth-century South as a primally visual, as well as oral and literary, culture. In reminding us of the central importance of photographic images in the making of the modern and postmodern South, Henninger also asks that we attend to the inextricable intersections of text and image in southern culture, and, further, that we think about the special ways that this cultural visuality has focused on the literal and figurative bodies of women. [End Page 160] Ladd, on the other hand, has the very categories “woman writer” and “South” in her revisionary sights. Resisting History takes as its problematic proving the centrality of the New Woman to the making-it-new of modernism: if, as Ladd argues, Enlightenment ideas from history to polity to the individual were all defined around a primary exclusion of women, a new breaking-down of the meaning and place of “woman” was essential to the modernist engagement with each of these terms. Ladd consequently interests herself in the dissolution rather than the instantiation of the category “woman,” and instead of producing a study of women writers she reads Faulkner contrapuntally with Welty and Hurston. The category “South,” while not an antagonistic term for her thesis, proves tangential to it; as she dispenses with the matter in her introduction, “[O]ne can say that . . . southerners have been constructed as ‘others’ in the national imaginary and that, for those few who were writers at least, it paid off.” So while Henninger breaks disciplinary bonds, she reinforces the category of “southern woman writer”; while Ladd undertakes a traditional literary-critical study, she finds the labels “southern” and “woman” limiting to it. Considering the two books together thus proves a mind-expanding exercise, raising questions about methodology, assumptions, and demystifications that will occur to each reader according to his or her intellectual predilections. Certainly nothing in these books is dull, and much is productive, energetic, and challenging. Ordering the Façade takes as its central site of investigation “textual photographs” (a term Henninger borrows from Judith Sensibar): scenes in contemporary fiction, autobiography, and poetry organized around the description, interpretation, investigation, and/or production of photographic images. Beginning in her introduction with two key textual-photograph scenes in modernist southern writing — the photograph that causes Janie to understand herself as “colored” in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the photograph of Aunt Amy that becomes a touchstone for Miranda’s identity formation in Katherine Anne Porter’s Old Mortality—Henninger goes on to focus on southern women writers of the most recent three decades, arguing that as photography has become increasingly denaturalized as a site of objective recording of reality, it has become a particularly fertile site for writers interested in exposing the constructedness of identities and the ideologies upholding social orders. As a corollary to the “textual photograph,” Henninger stresses the extent to which photographs themselves, rather than providing self-evidence, [End Page 161] “mean” only with the directing context of words; this symbiosis between text and photograph becomes a structuring element of her argument. Henninger opens with a useful “selected history of photography in the South...

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (review)

2??8Book Reviews213 and Filipinos he encountered in die course of his travels. While his knowledge of medicine and the world around him grew, so did the United States. When he entered the U.S. Army the frontier was still a very real part of American life; by the time Corbusier retired, the United States had become an urban, industrialized , world power. Wooster's editing and annotation are thorough and informative. One minor criticism is the lack of maps. There are only two maps in Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar, and at times it is difficult to follow Corbusier's many moves around the country. Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar should be read and compared to its companion volume by Fanny Dunbar Corbusier, William Henry Corbusier's wife of forty-eight years (see Fanny Dunbar Corbusier: Recollections ofHerArmy Life, 1869—1908, ed. by Patricia Y. Stallard, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). Both works are valuable contributions to American, and especially Western, history of the second half of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The combination of excellent scholarship , editing, and annotation makes these primary documents readily available to both scholars and the general public. McNeese State UniversityTerry Beckenbaugh The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. By Jane Turner Censer. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii+316. Acknowledgments, illustrations, epilogue, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-80712go7 "0. $59.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8071-2921-6. $24.95, Paper.) Readers may find the title of this impressively researched and persuasively argued work slightly misleading. As the author frankly acknowledges at the outset , the real focus is on elite white women (defined as those from families having fifteen or more slaves during the antebellum period) in Virginia and North Carolina; nonelite white women make very few appearances in the book. Nevertheless, the author draws from a broad base of sources, including correspondence , deeds, wills, and novels, and builds on the works of historians such as Anne Firor Scott and Edward Ayers to construct a thoroughly convincing portrait of an elite white womanhood caught in a period of "flux" (p. 50). The Civil War and the collapse of slavery, argues Censer, affected elite white women in complex ways. Expectations for these women, which before the war had centered on courtship and marriage, were called into question as women became increasingly willing to stay single, travel without chaperones, and study practical subjects in schools and academies. Paradoxically, married women in this period became "far more domesticated" (p. 89) as former house slaves deserted their mistresses and saddled them with household chores. This new domesticity was fed by a drift away from the nuclear family, the household structure prevalent among the region's elites before the war, and toward a multigenerational and laterally extended one. Women of die New South were also expected to care for and redeem their male relatives from depression and alcoholism, which Censer seems to suggest were on the rise following Appomattox. Property ownership was yet another aspect of women's lives that was in transition. Censer main- 214Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober tains that the antebellum trend toward greater property rights continued into the postwar era, augmented by testators' increased willingness to divide estates equally among sons and daughters. Even with more women controlling property, fewer were choosing to live on plantations. Censer argues diat elite white women in fact led the flight from the countryside, motivated by frustrations in dealing with servants and laborers and a fear of being isolated in rural areas with large numbers of black men. Those who moved to urban areas moved tentatively into "public" life, with many single women working as schoolteachers and othersjoining benevolent societies. She concludes the book with two chapters on women writers and literature. It is a truism that the historiography of the postwar South revolves around questions of change and continuity and is rarely, if ever, taken on its own terms. To her credit, Censer consistently avoids simplistic endorsements of one over the other. Instead, each chapter is ajudicious examination of change and continuity in a single aspect ofwomen's lives, the result being a complex portrait of an elite white womanhood in transition. At the same time, the notion ofwomen "in transition...

On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: Nostalgia, Sex, and the Souths of William Alexander Percy

On Naïve and Sentimental PoetryNostalgia, Sex, and the Souths of William Alexander Percy Benjamin E. Wise (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. When his publishers advertised William Alexander Percy's life story, Lanterns on the Levee, they promised readers he was "The Old South, living and incarnate." One reviewer of Percy's now-classic memoir wrote, "The author is a part of his own region, and his region is a part of him." William Alexander Percy, courtesy of the Collections of the William Alexander Percy Memorial Library, Greenville, Mississippi. "South! . . . These stars I know! . . . And south is Greece!" —William Alexander Percy, "Night Off Gallipoli" (1920) "We are homesick for 'the glory that was Greece.'" —Raymond Ganger to William Alexander Percy, 12 November 1921 [End Page 54] During his life and since his death in 1942, many people wanting to understand the American South have looked to William Alexander Percy. Understanding the man, it has seemed, might help us understand the region. Born into a prominent southern family and educated at Sewanee and Harvard, Will Percy spent most of his life working as a lawyer, poet, and civic leader in Greenville, Mississippi. Percy was centrally involved in several key moments in the history of Mississippi and the South, serving as a lieutenant in his father LeRoy's 1911 senatorial campaign against James K. Vardaman, openly opposing the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s, and leading the Red Cross in Greenville during the monumental flood of 1927. He recounted these and other aspects of his life in his artful, charming, and often-evasive memoir, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. When the publishers advertised Percy's life story, they promised readers he was "The Old South, living and incarnate." One reviewer of Percy's now-classic work wrote, "The author is a part of his own region, and his region is a part of him," while another suggested that "William Alexander Percy speaks for the Southern aristocracy." Evidence abounds in book reviews, obituaries, and reminiscences, as well as in scholarly books and articles, that Percy has become a place marker in southern studies for the genteel, paternalistic, and nostalgic elements of white southern life. He has been cast as a melancholic planter and dilettante poet whose gaze was fixed on his yearnings for the southern past, a symbolic role summed up in one of his obituaries: "Mr. Percy was the quintessence of the unreconstructed southerner."1 Will Percy, however, has never made a very good quintessential American southerner. In his life, he interacted with and was shaped by not merely the South but people, ideas, and experiences outside of the region and the nation. When he looked back in time with nostalgia, he was not always looking to the southern American past. In neither his prose nor his poetry was Percy nostalgic for the antebellum South so often embodied by mythical male ancestors, and he did not participate in the hero-worship surrounding the nation's Civil War. He joked about his suicidal antebellum family patriarch who walked "down to the creek with a sugar kettle, tied it round his neck, and hopped in," and he hinted at the contradictions of his war-veteran grandfather, who, though "an opponent of secession and a lukewarm slaveowner, was away fighting to destroy the Union and preserve the institution of slavery." Moreover, Percy was neither a champion of the bygone innocence of southern womanhood, nor of the closely related cult of the Lost Cause. He conjectured that "the lily-of-the-field life of the Southern gentlewoman" was an imaginative creation of "Northern critics and Southern sentimentalists," and commenting on the iconography of the Lost Cause, Percy dismissed statues celebrating Confederate valor as "dreadful" and "too pathetic" to be taken [End Page 55] seriously. The gendered nostalgia of many southern whites for Dixie, with its focus on Confederate soldiers and lily-white southern belles, was not Percy's.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Born into a prominent southern family and educated at Sewanee and Harvard, Will Percy spent most of his life working as a lawyer, poet, and civic...

Ordering the facade: photography and contemporary southern women's writing

Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. Ordering Facade traces visual and literary cultures of womanhood that have ordered image of the from its plantation past to its postsouthern present. Assessed in light of these visual legacies, contemporary writing by women emerges vividly in Henninger's analysis as both shaped by and shaping these continuously powerful representations. Typically celebrated for their oral traditions, Henninger argues, South and its literature have in fact primarily relied on visual characteristics such as skin color, gender, or dress to mark social place and identity. From postmodern art gallery to family album, photography in culture has both reinforced these cultural prejudices and provided potent counterimages. Henninger analyzes photography's literary functions in memoir, fiction, screenwriting, and poetry by a wide range of contemporary authors including Dorothy Allison, Ann Beattie, Rosemary Daniell, Julie Dash, Ronlyn Domingue, Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. As each of these writers distinctively re-envisions traditional constructions of womanhood, Henninger shows, she joins others in challenging constrictions of southern woman and so changing meaning of southernness itself.

The Southern Ties of Helen Keller

THOUGH HELEN KELLER LEFT HER PARENTS' HOME IN TUSCUMBIA, Alabama, at the young age of eight, the culture, people, and sensory adventures of her native state were essential to her outlook throughout her life. The deaf-blind activist, author, and world traveler, born in 1880, considered Ivy Green, her family's Tuscumbia home, as her own. Beginning in her lifetime and continuing today, Tuscumbia and Alabama have similarly regarded her as their own--even featuring her on the 2003 state quarter. Keller was also a child of the broader South. Though after her initial departure she always lived outside the region, her southern childhood and family ties formed and constituted vital elements of her public and private identity. She claimed this identity fondly but frequently labeled as shameful the dominant southern racial ideologies and practices. Paradoxically, it was perhaps Keller's disability that provided the opportunities that most frequently caused her to question southern gender and racial traditions. Her disability took her physically away from the South, as she and her family turned to northern educational institutions with historical ties to abolitionism. Her disability and her politics as an adult separated her from her family ideologically and geographically. Once she became world famous and increasingly active politically, those commenting upon or questioning her political ideas used her southern identity to either praise or deride her and her principles. As she traveled more, claiming global citizenship and analyzing national and world politics, she naturally did so from a base of knowledge and culture built on her southern background. Today, however, Keller is embraced as a national icon representing the triumphs of the disabled. Her image is now divorced from her southern identity. She is viewed as an American, devoid of regional affiliations or associations. In contrast, this essay positions Keller as a southerner of a Confederate family whose background and beliefs helped shape her worldview and her life as a white, southern woman with a disability. (1) Keller and her family embraced an esteemed southern heritage, which they perhaps regarded as being more illustrious than it really had been. When Keller wrote her autobiography, The Story of My Life, in 1903, she described her lineage according to both geography and the Civil War. In this narrative the men served and the women sired. Helen's father, Arthur H. Keller, served as a captain and her maternal grandfather as a brigadier general for the Confederacy. Her paternal grandmother, she noted, was second cousin to Robert E. Lee. Captain Keller edited the Tuscumbia North Alabamian for many years and served in the mid-1880s as U.S. marshal for the northern district of Alabama. Through him, the young Helen claimed Alexander Spotswood, a lieutenant governor (and de facto governor) in early-eighteenth-century Virginia, as her great-great-grandfather. (2) Captain Arthur Keller considered his family to be part of the deserving upper-class white elite, though they likely had less than he desired. Like many other southern landholding and formerly slaveholding whites, they had lost much of their wealth between 1860 and 1880. At the time of Helen Keller's birth, her family lived on the homestead her grandfather had built and named Ivy Green decades earlier due to the beautiful English ivy covering trees and fences. The Kellers were, however, no longer the wealthy family they once were. Moreover, the daily physical labor demanded to sustain the household, even with the aid of the formerly enslaved and their descendants, had surprised and exhausted Helen's young mother, Kate, after she became the second wife of the much older man whom all called Captain Keller. (3) The young toddler Helen, Kate's first child, became blind and deaf due to an illness at the age of nineteen months. From Ivy Green, Arthur and Kate Keller sought assistance with the child whom they loved but, as she grew older, felt increasingly incapable of parenting. …

The power to subvert?

Increasing support to women’s organisations and networks to facilitate empowerment is a growing strategy amongst a range of Northern agencies, with a particular emphasis on Southern women. This article argues that strategies employed by both Northern and Southern women’s NGOs to promote the ‘empowerment’ of women and subvert hegemonic discourses through information-sharing and privileging Southern voices deny the value-laden nature of ‘information’ and the relative power and universality of dominant gender and development narratives. It will illustrate how these narratives are historically contingent on prevailing power imbalances in social and political spaces and how development discourse and practice tends to privilege both a homogenous Southern narrative as well as a category of Southern woman that simply do not exist.

The Noah Confessions (review)

Reviewed by: Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story Deborah Stevenson Hahn, Mary Downing Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story. Clarion, 2007187p ISBN 0-618-66545-5$16.00 Ad Gr. 4-6 Expecting a car for her sixteenth birthday, Lynne is disappointed when all she gets is a battered old charm bracelet that once belonged to her deceased mom. By way of explanation, her father also gives her a long letter that Lynne's then sixteen-year-old mother wrote to a boy named Noah, which plunges Lynne into her parents' Southern Gothic past, a past utterly alien from the posh L.A. lifestyle she has always enjoyed. She learns that her mother's father was a social climber, an arsonist, and a murderer, and that her parents' first connection was through the tragic disappearance of the initial owner of her birthday bracelet—a wild young girl, a cousin of Lynne's father's, who babysat for Lynne's mother and got too close to her grandfather's secrets. She also learns how her father tried unsuccessfully to rescue her mother from her circumstances, but he was only able to give her the courage to eventually break away from a past that threatened to engulf her in a cycle of lies and denial. Indeed, Hall depends overmuch on the crazy Southern woman motif—Lynne's two grandmothers and one great grandmother all succumb to some form of insanity—but the train wreck of their past is too fascinating to look away from. Lynne's response to the revelations is random yet dramatically appropriate for an L.A. girl suddenly confronted with ghosts that threaten her genetic stability; she tests her own mettle against the sea and ends up nearly drowning in a surfing accident. Her near-death experience brings her into contact with her mother, who offers some affirmations on how she should live that empower Lynne to help her dad lay his own ghosts to rest. The life-affirming ending thus balances the bone-chilling melodrama of dark family secrets; fans of Carol Plum-Ucci will appreciate this dramatic and emotional story. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF SHIءI MODERNISM: MORALITY AND GENDER IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY LEBANON

In an early 1980s interview, Amira Muhammad ءAli al-Houmani, daughter of one of the 20th century's most revered Lebanese Shiءi poets, insisted that the “southern woman” (al-marʿa al-janūbiyya) had always been a “partner” to the southern Lebanese man, both “in the house and in the field.” She explained how Lebanese women both in and from the south have historically played important domestic as well as productive economic roles spanning both the private and the public. Beyond casual nods toward their political and economic participation, however, disputes about and including Shiءi women in Lebanon and, more broadly put, discussions of and about gender, generally have been occluded from historical narratives. Considering the indisputable contemporary significance of Lebanese Shiءi communities in Jabal ءAmil (South Lebanon), the Bekaء Valley, and Beirut, it is even more remarkable that the diverse histories of gender in Shiءi Lebanon have yet to be written.

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865 (review)

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in Urban South, 1800-1865. By Christine Jacobson Carter. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. x, 200. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.)In An Evening When Alone (1993), historian Michael O'Brien called for more systematic study of antebellum South's single women. The assumed centrality of plantation mistress, he implied, had drawn attention away from her more numerous sisters-middle- and lower-class women, urban women, slave women, unruly women, and fallen women among them. Single women, he felt, had been particularly overlooked, and it was lacuna he began to fill with his edited collection of four journals of single women in South. Though desire for independence deserves consideration as among [these] journals' more consistent topics, O'Brien noted in his introduction, perhaps their theme . . . is loneliness, its presence and looming persistence (6).Thirteen years later, O'Brien's call for more systematic study has been (partly) answered by Christine Jacobson Carter. In her examination of affluent, single white women of antebellum Savannah and Charleston, however, Carter stresses different predominant theme: usefulness, she claims, not loneliness, circumscribed and gave meaning to these women's lives. In urban centers of South, elite unmarried women socialized, volunteered, churched, and traveled together (9). They were reserve army of paternalism, plugging holes in nuclear families, stitching up South's social fabric, and propping up its many fictions, even those that caged them.Carter is quick to admit that Savannah and Charleston were atypical, if not unique. Plugged into a wider seaboard of letters and ideas, these coastal towns trafficked in Northern notions of domesticity that be practiced outside home (41). In South's urban enclaves, single women were not denigrated as unchosen ones, flawed and deficient (43). Instead they were allowed, even encouraged, to play more vital social roles. Carter is sensitive to fact that although they were intertwined with North, these Southern cities were also instruments of greater plantation culture (51). In South, man's mastery, unquestioned and unquestionable, relied on natural and reinforcing dependency of his wife, children, and slaves.How then woman be single and natural? How she play an independent social role without undermining South's social dependencies? Only through usefulness to others, Carter concludes, could unmarried women save themselves from long-held stereotype of pathetic, barren, cold, and crotchety old maid (47). Thus, South's single women had to walk thin line. Selfishness of any kind was abhorrent; it was Northern, threat, and it brought stinging rebuke. A single woman help raise her sister's children; she sing praises of her brother and father; she sing sweetly in church and feed poor, but she not venture too far. She had to remain within the bounds of southern womanhood, which may have expected marriage and motherhood but demanded piety, dependence, and service to others (66). …

The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier (review)

Reviewed by: The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier Jonathan M. Berkey The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier. Edited by Giselle Roberts. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Pp. 274. $39.95.) Readers of this journal know Sarah Morgan as the member of an elite Louisiana family who recorded her Civil War exploits in her diary, most recently published as The Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan (1991). Giselle Roberts has edited a collection of postwar correspondence and editorials that explores Sarah Morgan's worldview in the years following Confederate defeat. The book effectively illustrates Morgan's struggle to reconcile her antebellum expectations of Southern womanhood with the realities of life in the postwar South. The refugee life Sarah chronicled in her Civil War journal continued after the war. With the family home in Baton Rouge in ruins, Sarah and her mother moved into the South Carolina household of Sarah's brother James. When James married in early 1873, Sarah felt unwelcome in the household, and James and his new wife did little to discourage this notion. About this time, Frank Dawson, a recently widowed newspaperman and Confederate veteran, began corresponding with Sarah. Hoping to alleviate her plight, Dawson boldly proposed that Sarah become a correspondent for the Charleston News and Courier. Although she was ambivalent about taking the position, Sarah accepted Dawson's offer and wrote more than seventy articles during 1873. By the fall of that year, Sarah had determined to move out of her brother's household and succeeded in securing lodgings in [End Page 199] Charleston. Dawson's persistent pursuit of Sarah paid off in January 1874, when he married her. Giselle Roberts draws upon more than 190 letters and numerous editorials to document Sarah's writing career and her relationship with Frank during 1873. The collection reveals Sarah's uncertainty about her place in the postwar social order. Many of her editorials criticized Southerners' view of women's social roles. Sarah stressed that unmarried women could contribute to their families and society, and she urged Southerners to provide opportunities for poor women to support themselves through honorable occupations. Sarah and Frank's personal correspondence reflects and complicates Sarah's editorial persona. While she publicly championed honorable work for dependent women, she remained ambivalent about her own career as a newspaper correspondent. She was loath to reveal her identity to others, even when they praised her editorials. Her relationship with Frank only added to her ambivalence. Frank's letters were a mixture of business details and personal proclamations that often made Sarah uncomfortable. Throughout their correspondence, Frank pledged his love and suggested marriage. Sarah parried his advances but remained reticent about his future prospects. Roberts has done a fine job editing this collection. She groups the editorials topically in chapters that roughly correspond to the chronology of the letters. Most pieces feature a brief introduction placing each document in its proper context. Roberts references the many literary allusions the couple used that might be unfamiliar to modern readers. Few of the people mentioned in letters or editorials escape identification. Roberts's editorial prowess cannot overcome the one significant weakness of the collection, however. None of Sarah's letters survives between January and June 1873. While the reader gains some sense of Sarah's point of view by inference from Frank's letters, the absence of her own correspondence weakens the first half of the book; Sarah's first letter, dated July 25th, appears on page 141. The relative paucity of primary sources by Southern civilians during Reconstruction makes this flaw less glaring. The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson contributes to the historiographical debate over how the Civil War affected Southern women. Sarah's correspondence and editorials suggest that the war did not lead women to embrace new opportunities, but rather forced them to forge new identities by reconciling their antebellum views of Southern womanhood with the realities of Reconstruction. This collection will not disappoint readers interested in rituals of courtship and the...

Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South

Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine path breaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn't own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field into new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

Home is Where Art Begins: The Works of Clyde Connell

Students can be inspired as they examine the art and life of Clyde Connell (1901–1998). Connell was a woman who lived almost her whole life within a 5O-mile radi us of Shreveport, Louisiana, but traveled to New York City regularly for years. Connell was nearly 60 years old before she focused full attention on making art, and her most creative years began at an age when many people slow down. In a time of great personal disappointment and hardship, this gentle Southern woman rose above her circumstances to create a new life as an artist, reinterpreting her story in works of many media.This Instructional Resources includes three themes that appear in Connell's collage and mixed-media sculptures, each theme reflecting an aspect of home. Strategies for looking and interpreting, and a project idea are provided for each theme. The unit concludes with assessment suggestions.

To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910

These previously unpublished private writings expand our understanding of Grace King (1852-1932) as a writer and as a nineteenth-century, middle-class, white southern woman. A prolific New Orleans author who transcended the local-color genre of her day, King has long been admired for her versatility in many written forms, her depictions of both black and white women in a variety of settings and situations, and her insights into the intricate social structure of her native city. Over a span of forty-six years, King produced four histories, three novels and two novellas, three collections of stories, two biographies, an autobiography, a play, and numerous articles and sketches. At age thirty-four she began a journal to find my own peace in my own life. As Melissa Walker Heidari notes, King's journals offer is so lacking in her published autobiography: humor, irony, and a more candid assessment of herself and others. The Grace King of the autobiography is an interesting subject, but Grace King in her journals is alive and compelling. King's journals became a sourcebook for writing ideas, an outlet for opinions on current issues that she felt uncomfortable discussing publicly, and a record of her experiences at home and on her travels in the northern United States and Europe. She also used her journals as a form of therapy for her grief over the loss of loved ones and for her regrets, both personal and professional. This volume comprises King's journals of 1886-1901, 1904, and 1907-1910. Heidari's introduction puts King's life and work in the context of recent scholarship in women's life narratives and discusses what the journals reveal about such topics as the lives of unmarried women in the nineteenth-century South, the ways Victorian families dealt with diseases like alcoholism and depression, and the challenges facing women writers of the period.

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895

This impressively researched book tells the important but little-known story of elite white women's successful quest for a measure of self-reliance and independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow. Profusely illustrated with the experiences of fascinating women in Virginia and North Carolina, it presents a compelling new chapter in the history of American women and of the South. As were many ideas, notions of the ideal woman were in flux after the Civil War. While poverty added a harder edge to the search for a good marriage among some southern belles, other privileged white women forged identities that challenged the belle model altogether. Their private and public writings from the 1870s and 1880s suggest a widespread ethic of autonomy. Sometimes that meant increased domestic skills born of the new reality of fewer servants. But women also owned and transmitted property, worked for pay, and even pursued long-term careers. Many found a voice in a plethora of new voluntary organizations, and some women attained national celebrity in the literary world, creating strong and capable heroines and mirroring an evolving view toward northern society. Yet even as elite women experimented with their roles, external forces and contradictions within their position were making their unprecedented attitudes and achievements socially untenable. During the 1890s, however, virulent racism and pressures to re-create a mythic South left these women caught between the revived image of the belle and the emerging emancipated woman. Just as the memoirs of white women have been key to understanding life during the Civil War, the writings of such women unlock the years of dramatic change that followed. Informed by myriad primary documents, Jane Turner Censer immerses us in the world of postwar women as they rethought and rebuilt themselves, their families, and their region during a brief but important period of relative freedom.

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895

Book Review| January 01 2005 The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Jane Turner Censer. Sally G. McMillen Sally G. McMillen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2005) 79 (1): 118–119. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-79.1.118 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sally G. McMillen; The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Agricultural History 1 January 2005; 79 (1): 118–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-79.1.118 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAgricultural History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2005 Agricultural History Society2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review of The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 by Jane Turner Censer:The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895

Review of The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 by Jane Turner Censer:The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895