Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida.

Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida. Edited by Jack E. Davis and Kari Frederickson. Foreword by Gary R. Mormino and Raymond Arsenault. The Florida History and Culture Series. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2003. Pp. viii, 324. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2604-0.)

In his introduction to this collection, Jack E. Davis explains the need for a volume of Florida history about women activists. Throughout most of the past century, he says, Floridian women were marginalized citizens of a state whose own story was marginalized by the arbiters of regional and national history. If, as most U.S. history books still do, one begins the national story with the European invasion, then Florida's story should come first, but Virginia, alas, always gets the honors. If slavery, cotton, Jim Crow, and homegrown "cracker" culture--as well as one-party control until the Democratic Party came to represent civil rights--make a state "southern," then Florida is most assuredly southern, despite the fact that many southern historians think the real South ends at the St. Mary's River. As Davis comments, "If change drives historical inquiry, one must wonder why historians mostly avoid Florida, for change has been the common experience for Floridians in the twentieth century" (p. 4).

In many ways the nation mirrored what happened first in Florida in the fifty years after World War II, as migration and immigration tested the limits of physical and economic resources, and the state's political structure teetered under the burden. And from the beginning of the century, Florida women, like their sisters in the North, struggled to make their voices heard in a masculine world. Often discounted on account of their sex, they have nevertheless been reformers, pulling the state away from politics as usual and toward a safer and more humane future. The thirteen authors whose work is presented here explore ways in which women, while still politically and economically marginalized, learned to exert influence, sway opinions, and achieve results that improved the lives of Florida families and communities.

This is a very diverse group of essays. Four appeared earlier--most Florida scholars are familiar, for instance, with Nancy A. Hewitt's valuable work on Tampa and Maxine D. Jones's insightful articles about Mary McLeod Bethune, Eartha White, and other black women in Florida cities. An essay by Ellen Babb about St. Petersburg women (especially activist Bette Wimbish) follows Jones's article and enhances our understanding of the civil rights period. Although some of the essays in Making Waves are in effect collective biographies or social histories of a particular place or movement, others tell the story of a primary female activist. Ruth Bryan Owen, the subject of the book's first essay (by Sally Vickers), came into the state in the 1920s with Progressive ideas that fueled her interest in reform and led her to serve two terms as a congresswoman from Florida. A different kind of political activist, librarian Ruth Perry never reached Owen's celebrity, but, as Judith G. Poucher shows, this civil libertarian from Miami fought courageously to preserve the integrity of the NAACP's membership files against the "red scare" directed by Florida's McCarthyite "John's Committee" in the late 1950s. An essay by Laura B. Danahy describes the efforts of another Miami reformer, "Elizabeth Virrick, the Maverick of Miami Slum Clearance," during the same decade (chap. 10). A great deal of the book's appeal comes from the breadth of the work from less well known contributors: Patsy West's article about Seminole leader Betty Mac Tiger Jumper, Carol Giardina's description of the feminist movement in 1970s Gainesville, and Kathleen Hardee Arsenault's literary biography of children's writer Lois Lenski are three very interesting contributions that showcase the diversity of the collection. By the same token, Lynne A. Reiff's description of the connections between the work of home demonstration agents and improvement in the lives of Florida's rural women and their families introduces us to a constituency seldom addressed by those who write twentieth-century women's history.

The section called "Environmentalists" chronicles the evolution from Jack Davis's famous old-fashioned conservationist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, to the clubwomen fighting air pollution who are the subject of an essay by Scott H. Dewey, to Lee Irby's dedicated ecologist and political activist, Marjorie Harris Carr of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal fight. Like many of the other essays, these will be very useful to teachers. Irby's essay on Carr, in particular, explains a poorly understood crusade that should be part of Florida history courses. A Florida native like this reviewer cannot help noticing that in each case these activists, though longtime residents, were migrants who came to stay and made a difference. These are not simply important Florida stories; they are essays about significant American women and their organizations, key players in transforming the state and region in the twentieth century.

Florida Atlantic University 

SARAH H. BROWN