Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War.

Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War. By Kirsten E. Wood. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5528-6; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2859-9.)

Kirsten E. Wood's contribution to the University of North Carolina Press's Gender and American Culture series turns on a contradiction: how could southern women be both feminine and powerful? In seven tightly constructed chapters, Wood explores the seeming contradictions posed by slaveholding widows in the Old South, who "acted like masters" yet expected to be "treated like ladies" (p. 102). She reveals that while elite white women's privileged status as slaveholders allowed them to circumvent some of the limitations of gender, these "masterful women" achieved social acceptance, economic success, and even political power at great personal cost. Wood confounds easy generalizations about gender and power as she demonstrates that wealthy and powerful women "could act masterfully without in fact feeling masterful" (p. 131).

Focusing on slaveholding widows in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, Wood demonstrates how southern women parlayed their experience with "surrogate mastery" and their ties to extended kin into effective moneymaking and slave-management strategies (p. 29). Wood points out that these women used many of the same techniques as their male counterparts, such as relying on agents and correspondence, but asserts that these business practices carried a special meaning for widows, allowing them to simultaneously exercise power and appear feminine. Yet despite occasional rhetorical nods to conventional notions of gender, in their business acumen and in their calculating attitude toward slaves, "slaveholding widows virtually collapsed any distinctions between male and female spheres of knowledge and activity" (p. 90).

As beneficiaries of an elitism that bound the "leading men and women" of the slaveholding South together--quite different from the herrenvolk democracy of all white men that some historians attribute to the Old South--slaveholding widows were essentially conservative (p. 103). While their conservatism perhaps enabled their success in the antebellum era, it also ensured their difficulties during the Civil War and their failure in its aftermath. For if both ladyhood and mastery depended on slavery, as Wood contends, then neither could easily survive its demise (p. 190).

Building on insights about women, kinship, and politics in the slaveholding South from Lorri Glover (All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry [Baltimore, 2000]), Drew Gilpin Faust (Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War [Chapel Hill, 1996]), and Stephanie McCurry (Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country [New York, 1995]), among others, Wood has pieced together legal records, personal writings, and slave narratives to produce a comprehensive study of women who wielded power in the Old South. Along the way, she energetically yet gracefully engages in historiographical debates about the nature of slavery (paternalism versus capitalism), class relations (democracy versus elitism), and the meaning of gender (role versus identity). Masterful Women is an articulate and provocative book that will command the attention of scholars of women, gender relations, slavery, and the American South.

University of Montana

ANYA JABOUR