Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice. (Book Reviews).

Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice. By Kathryn L. Nasstrom. With a foreword by Julian Bond. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. [xiv], 221. $26.00, ISBN 0-8014-3782-2.)

Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool tells the story of civil and human rights activist Frances Freeborn Pauley in her own words. Pauley's work as a liberal Christian activist in Georgia extended from the 1930s into the 1990s. Pauley, who considered herself a "damn Yankee" even though she was raised and educated in the South (p. 1), participated in the fight to end segregation in schools and society, to improve the health care of the poor, and to defeat the county unit system in Georgia. Pauley frankly discusses her work for civil rights and integration at the grassroots level with groups as diverse as the League of Women Voters and SNCC, and she also talks about her experiences working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King and against Herman Talmadge. In his foreword Julian Bond praises Pauley's determined and cheerful efforts in work that few wanted to do. Bond writes that Pauley represents "the best of Southern Ladyhood--that combination of sweetness and steel, magnolias and muscle that melts opposition with a smile and reasoned argument--not a crinolined Scarlett O'Hara facsimile, but an iron-willed amazon in pantsuit and sneakers" (p. viii).

Unfortunately, Pauley's determination to recount only the positive aspects of her career, combined with Professor Nasstrom's obvious admiration of her subject, has resulted in a somewhat skewed portrait. Nasstrom mentions Pauley's tendency to tell stories with positive outcomes, especially her reticence to recount her personal life, writing that "any degree of difficulty would distract from a life story that tends towards a narrative of success" (p. 185). Nasstrom also notes that Pauley was reluctant to discuss certain parts of her career, such as her service on the Georgia Advisory Council to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The book reads like an autobiography because the reader is not aware at first that much of the text (narrated in the first person) consists of responses to an interviewer's questions and thus lacks the analytic editorial commentary and contextual background of a conventional biography.

The body of the book comes directly from primary sources including Pauley's papers, letters, speeches, and a series of interviews she dictated over a twenty-five-year period, but it is not a verbatim account. Nasstrom combines material from a variety of primary sources to provide "the clearest narrative flow and the greatest impact" (p. 198), but she does so without footnoting any of the narrative chapters. She does include the source materials for these chapters at the end of the book, but the notes are, for the most part, general rather than specific. Professor Nasstrom has also chosen to include very little contextual or editorial material within the body of the book, instead presenting some of this information in a concluding chapter. Even in this chapter, however, Pauley's direct quotations are not footnoted.

Pauley's life story is a welcome addition to the literature on the civil rights movement and women's history, but the book would have benefited from more critical analysis as well as consistent, detailed identification of the sources used.

ELSA A. NYSTROM
Kennesaw State University