Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South.

Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. By LeeAnn Whites. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, c. 2005. Pp. viii, 244. Paper $26.95, ISBN 1-1403-6312-6; cloth, $79.95, ISBN 1-4039-6311-8.)

In this collection of essays, LeeAnn Whites leaves little room to dispute her central tenet: gender matters. Gender matters in the way historians and students understand southern history, and gender mattered in the way historical actors experienced the past. In these essays, some new and some reprinted, Whites successfully demonstrates how gender influenced the development of the southern social order through a variety of topics including secession, the Missouri home front during the Civil War, industrialization of the postwar South, the appointment of the first woman to serve in the United States Senate (Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia), and disputes over a Confederate monument at the University of Missouri in the late twentieth century.

Whites's most important contribution is her emphasis on how the domestic world politicized and frequently polarized the nineteenth-century South. In a series of essays on Missouri during the Civil War, she demonstrates how the home took on increasing political importance as women's loyalty was determined by their roles as mothers and daughters and as prostitution became associated with the perception of Union soldiers. Whites successfully carries this theme through the postwar period in essays about the industrial and segregated South. She is especially convincing in her discussion of the alliance Rebecca Latimer Felton secured among southern white women, from elites to millworker wives. She demonstrates that Felton succeeded in convincing southern white women that their domestic experiences as mothers and their common heritage as defeated Confederates bound them together regarding issues of prohibition, labor, and race relations.

Although Whites should be applauded for reminding the reader that gender is not the province of women alone, for men too have gender, her essays on masculinity lack the meticulous analysis of those on femininity. She argues, for instance, that "the outbreak of militant labor organizing and strikes in Augusta in the 1880s and 1890s can be understood as part of a larger process of renegotiation of what it meant to be a free white man in late-nineteenth-century Georgia" (p. 118). Whites explains that cotton mills began in antebellum Georgia to reinforce the patriarchal order by providing jobs for widows and children, but she never quite follows through on how this translated into new definitions of manhood in the postwar period.

Ironically, her emphasis on masculinity occasionally leads her to overlook the ways in which white women employed their gender in a positive manner. For example, Whites revisits her earlier contention that southern white women organized memorial associations to bolster ex-Confederate men's self-esteem or, as she describes it, to reconstruct white manhood. But by focusing on the rhetoric of these women rather than on the larger political and cultural significance of their efforts to memorialize the defeated Confederacy, she neglects the ways in which elite white southerners (both men and women) recognized that women's gender shielded them from charges of treason by Union officials. What is most frustrating about this oversight is that Whites acknowledges such gender immunity in her essay on Missouri's war of households.

The collection's first two essays are most likely to spark debate among Civil War historians. The first, which oddly bears the same name as her book The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, Ga., 1995), argues that gender was just as imperative to sectional politics as race. While many men and women undoubtedly found themselves simultaneously playing new roles and responding to the conflict with traditional gender expectations, few would have considered it a "crisis," as her title suggests. In the second essay she argues that a study of the National Loyal League reveals the ways that gender mattered in "the construction of an intensified allegiance to the Union and to the ultimate success of the northern war effort" (p. 26). Although this essay offers a fresh interpretation of the differences between the behavior of northern and southern women during the war, Whites fails to prove that northern women's loyalty had a substantive positive or negative effect on the Union war effort.

Although readers will find some of Whites's essays more persuasive than others, this collection reinforces the ways in which gender was no less significant than class, race, or region in influencing the lives of all southerners--men and women, white and black--in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. In fact, perhaps she will consider expanding her material on Missouri's Civil War and Rebecca Latimer Felton into two book-length studies. But as it stands, this collection belongs on the shelves of any serious scholar or student of southern or gender history.

CAROLINE E. JANNEY

Purdue University