Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South.

Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South. Edited by Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2004. Pp. xx, 234. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8203-2616-X; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8203-2423-X.)

The unrelenting image of the chivalrous, aristocratic planter, with his strict sense of honor and masterful control of women, children, and slaves--which has defined and dominated the historical understanding of southern manhood has at long last been challenged. Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South corrects and complicates the historiography of masculinity in southern history by presenting research about men who owned neither slaves nor land and could not fulfill or aspire to this elite ideal. This anthology, which includes a brief introduction and nine essays, explores a variety of historical analyses of gender and the meanings of manhood in the history of the Old South. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover note the importance of previous works on southern manhood by W. J. Cash, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Stephanie McCurry, and Kathleen Brown. That body of scholarship details the quintessential southern male as both a privileged, aggressive planter, who was easily provoked when his honor was questioned, and a landed slaveholder, who exerted mastery over family, household, and plantation based on a model of white paternalism. This book goes further to move current scholarship "beyond a white male paradigm of honor and mastery" and to show how men outside the planter class (e.g., yeomen, artisans, teenage boys, blacks, and Choctaw Indians) experienced and expressed contextualized forms of manliness (p. xiv). These essays demonstrate the richness and complexity of southern masculinities in the antebellum and Civil War eras.

The articles cover a number of topics, including the education of boys at military academies; the experience of men in state militias; elite Choctaw men and adaptation to new models of manhood; fraternal organizations of white and black artisans; status aspirations of white men from middling backgrounds; images of white manliness in southern humor; black masculinity among slaves on the southern frontier; and the meaning of literacy and manhood for African American soldiers during the Civil War. These essays demonstrate the multiple ways southern men enacted and negotiated masculinity through educational training, property acquisition, militia service, fraternal relationships, social aspirations, clothing, personal decorum, and displays of appropriate masculine traits such as individualism, discipline, and self-reliance. Masculinity as a process is particularized by social indexes such as race, class, and age. It also took time to achieve, as in the case of the teenage boy who tried to "struggle on manfully" at a military academy and the African American soldier who strove to "think as a man" (pp. 183, 200). Attained by degrees, southern manhood occurred in response to gendered norms and community values and was always shaped by southern racial ideology.

This volume proffers a necessary corrective to the historiography of southern manhood. It deepens our knowledge of masculinities in southern society to include men who were not slaveholders, landowners, upper class, or white. While some of these articles address gender experiences particular to men, such as service in the militia and army, attention to the role of other forms of organized violence--such as the experience of patrollers, overseers, slave catchers, and slave breakers--in defining and framing the male identities of middle-class white men, would have been welcome. This suggestion does not take away from the quality of this scholarship but rather demonstrates how this collection will spark future research to understand the breadth and depth of the myriad masculinities evident in nineteenth-century southern history.

JANET MOORE LINDMAN

Rowan University