"Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph": Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities.

"Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph": Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities. Edited by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond. Foreword by John David Smith. New Perspectives on the History of the South. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2003. Pp. xii, 323. $55.00. ISBN 0-8130-2675-X.)

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, more than one truth stands out: sources for the mining of women's history have become much more accessible: the use of gender as a system of analysis has found its way into emerging studies in the field of southern women's history: and written histories have at last begun to shift toward a more balanced representation of southern women reformers and their conservative counterparts.

This anthology began its a response to two papers delivered at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association. From there it grew to include fourteen essays produced by graduate students and established scholars. The theme of change--"social, personal and institutional, and community"--binds the whole (p. xi). After an insightful introduction by Anne Firor Scott, part 1 explores concepts of the private world of marriage and antebellum education. Familiar to many readers of colonial literature is the tumultuous marriage of William Byrd 11 and his wife Lucy. In Paula A. Treckel's essay, Lucy assumes the mantle of a rebellious wife, while, according to Giselle Roberts, a century and a half later Sarah Morgan struggled to retain her self-identity against the post Civil War concepts of womanhood. Blanche Ames, wife of Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames, found herself an unwilling partner to her husband's tour of duty in southern politics, writes Warren Ellem. Anya Jabour's essay explores the notion that female academies gave young women "a sense of self anchored in female community" (p. 88).

Part 2, "The Civil War Era," stretches from the Civil War home front in Edgefield County, South Carolina, to the turn of the century and the founding of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Orville Vernon Burton wades into the debate about the influence of the Civil War on women's lives, choosing the interpretation that great changes resulted for southern women. Barbara E. Mattick's chapter suggests that little changed for the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Augustine, who in the 1860s taught the domestic ideal to middle-class white girls and freedpeople. Karen L. Cox reveals the generational shifts that accompanied the growth of the UDC, but she argues that UDC members achieved success by erecting Confederate monuments and by convincing northerners that reconciliation would be on southern terms.

In addition to Karen Cox, Glenn Feldman and Pamela Tyler offer in part 3 what may be the book's most needed chapters, on women who upheld the South's conservative ideology and acted as culture carriers for the region's continued racism. That the Ku Klux Klan tortured female "miscreants" and accepted other women in auxiliary units is a paradox of the 1920s, writes Feldman. That southern women both adored and hated Eleanor Roosevelt, Tyler contends, exposes the region's fault lines on race and class. After noting Roosevelt's sympathies for improved race relations and organized labor, Tyler asserts that "Any southerner who accepted the status quo with equanimity found [Eleanor Roosevelt] a menace, because she worked tirelessly for change" (p. 195). More is needed on the interesting interplay between women and the conservative ideology of the South.

Part 4, "The Era of Social Change," shifts to the reformers of the South. Sarah Hart Brown gives life to Esther C. Jackson, who, as wife of activist James E. Jackson, defended the voting rights of African Americans. She directed the Southern Negro Youth Congress until 1949, when the FBI engineered its demise; she worked to register black veterans at the close of World War 11; and she edited the radical journal Freedomways until 1986. Kathi Kern recounts the childhood of Mississippian Thelma McGee, exposing the harsh boundaries imposed on farm children--from landowners who forced them to pick cotton at the commencement of school to their betrayal by black teachers who saw them as unworthy of higher learning. Catherine Fosl and Elizabeth Jacoway prove that the "silent" South included such notable liberal white women as Anne Braden and Vivian Brewer. Michelle Haberland provides a remarkable view of the historic struggle between advocates for women's rights and supporters of protection for women in the apparel industries. In labor, as in race relations, women's concerns were complicated by their primary loyalties to family and community.

Many chapters stand on their own as perceptive and insightful. Problems of unity and coherence arise when themes as broad as "change, struggle, triumph, institutions, and communities" are brought together under the same umbrella and when chapters range temporally from 1710 to 1986. Still, a collection of essays such as this serves well to announce new scholarship, debut rising scholars, and provide useful studies for the growing field of southern women's history.

University of North Texas

ELIZABETH HAYES TURNER