Southern Women at Vassar: the Poppenheim Family Letters, 1882-1916.

Edited by Joan Marie Johnson. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xvi], 258. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-443-5.)

In 1882 sixteen-year-old Mary Poppenheim, eldest child of a well-to-do Charleston family, entered the preparatory department at Vassar College; she graduated in 1888. Her parents insisted on a Vassar education for all four of their daughters, despite its high cost and the girls' prolonged absences from the close-knit family circle. The letters in this volume, mostly between the two oldest daughters, Mary and Louisa, and their mother, offer interesting details about student life at a women's college in the 1880s and the life of an elite urban family in the New South, but they do not add significantly to scholarly knowledge in either field.

Like many others in the first generation of college women, the Poppenheims did not initially envision higher education as a life-altering experience. Their mother fervently hoped her daughters would never have to earn their own living, and their father promised each graduate a yearly allowance when she returned to live at home, after which the young women were expected to marry. Such conservative attitudes explain, perhaps, the Poppenheims' devotion to their daughters' education and their apparent lack of concern about contemporary warnings that college women would not fulfill women's mission in life--to marry and have children. It is disappointing, however, that editor Joan Marie Johnson leaves the story there, not commenting on the fact that Mary and Louisa ultimately chose a non-traditional lifestyle, remaining single and becoming passionately involved in civic affairs. A discussion of their decisions, comparing them to those made by other white southern women of their generation, would have enhanced the value of the letters for understanding the history of women's higher education.

Johnson argues that the letters demonstrate the Poppenheims' southern pride and their determination not to acknowledge any form of northern "superiority." Certainly "southernness" was a key component of the family's identity. Mrs. Poppenheim could not bear to visit Jefferson Davis in Savannah, lest she "awaken memories too sacred ... [for] this busy bustling world" (p. 115). The daughters advised their parents to subscribe to the Atlantic because it displayed greater fairness toward the South than other publications. On the whole, however, the letters demonstrate sectional reconciliation among white Americans following Reconstruction and a lack of essential differences between northern Vassar students and the Poppenheim sisters. Mary and Louisa never complained about regional or personal slights; indeed, both were elected to high offices in Vassar's student organizations.

Apart from some illuminating details and the occasional sparkling phrase, the letters can be tedious to read. Although Johnson identifies names and events in the correspondence, her notes in the back of the book are not easily referenced. And aside from their obsession with each others' health (an understandable preoccupation in that era), the letter writers devote most attention to the endless intricacies of dressmaking. A shorter volume, with additional contextual material, would have been more useful both to historians and general readers.

LYNN D. GORDON

University of Rochester