Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader

"History is always unfinished," Anne Firor Scott reminds us in the initial essay of Christie Farnham's Women of the American South: A Mulitcultural Reader. In the second essay, a folkloric account tells how corn came to the Choctaws: a crow "dropped a grain at the feet of a little girl" and that one grain of corn "revolutionized life for the prehistoric ancestors of the Choctaws" (11). Perhaps Farnham's eclectic collection will serve as just such a grain for southern historiography. The various authors of this collection provide an overview of southern women's historiography calling attention to the comparatively recent amplification of women's stories (Scott adapted this essay from her longer article in the Journal of Women's History in 1996). Scott points out that following civil rights struggles and the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, women of many different perspectives entered the traditionally male-dominated field of history. This first book to bring together such a variety of perspectives is a particularly valuable addition to the women's and southern studies canons. The seventeen interpretive essays are connected by Farnham's solid prefaces, fastening them, one at a time, onto a historical time line stretching from the practices of hunter-gatherers to current feminist and lesbian concerns. Reading these essays on women's "progress" chronologically, however, brings us to the ironic realization that freedoms feminists and lesbians struggle for today were the unquestioned birthright of many Native American women five hundred years ago. In her prefaces, Farnham not only sketches in major milestones like the women's suffrage movement; she follows general statements with concrete examples. For instance, she points out that large cultural changes coming out of the New Deal were accelerated by paved roads, radio, the movies, and the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Farnham's prefaces knit together the American Revolution, Enlightenment intellectual thought, Cherokee women's efforts toward an assimilation that would preserve vital aspects of their cultural inheritance, Garveyism, the economic changes the boll weevil wrought, the Civil Rights movement, and current thinking on the social construction of gender.

The stories in Women enlarge a niche formerly dominated by the image of the pure white woman alone on her pedestal or, at best, balanced by the equally stereotypical figure of the black mammy. Eighteenth-century scholars will be particularly interested in "A Struggle for Survival: Non-Elite White Women in Lowcountry Georgia, 1790-1830," "Cherokee Women and Cultural Change" (1750-1838), "The Politics of Pedagogy and Judaism in the Early Republican South: The Case of Rachel and Eliza Mordecai," and "According to His Wish and Desire: Female Kin and Female Slaves in Planter Wills" (1820--1860). The essay on planters' wills includes useful tables and statistics.

As one reads, a more nearly comprehensive view of southern sisterhood emerges. We find Choctaw and Cherokee women in matrilineal cultures deciding without censure whom to marry and when to employ birth control, give birth, abort, practice infanticide, and divorce. We meet poor white women in Savannah working alongside black women in mills and brothels, while others accepted support and training from benevolent organizations intent on inculcating social controls. "Equality Deferred, Opportunity Pursued: The Sisters of Wachovia" follows the religious Moravian "Single Sisters" who achieved autonomy operating a prosperous boarding school. "The Northern Myth of the Rebel Girl" explores ways in which the Civil War was cast in sexual terms caricaturing southern women as unhealthily passionate combatants of the Northern Armies, while "Stand By Your Man" describes women made independent by the absence of southern soldiers--women energetic to rehabilitate veterans and honor the sacrifices of this "holy war."

"Susannah and the Elders of Potiphar's Wife: Allegations of Sexual Misconduct at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute" delves into sexual and political issues within the black community itself. (Readers unfamiliar with the biblical references in this title may be frustrated by the fact that the reference is not explained until the end of the essay and is ultimately extraneous.) "Most Sacrificing Service" discusses the "racial uplift" (emulation of white ideals regarding sexuality and work) many black leaders encouraged in order to dignify blacks' image. Intent on eradicating negative racial stereotypes, educators Lucy Craft Laney and Mary McLeod Bethune honed a joint vision of female strength and propriety that accorded with white Victorian notions.

The essay on Garveyism and women's grassroots organization in Virginia examines the legacies of role models like Amy Garvey, Madame Walker, Henrietta Davis, and M. L. T. De Mena. "Black Women's Culture of Resistance and the Right to Vote" demonstrates how black women's energies were split between working for women's rights and fighting for the repeal of racially discriminatory laws. Their "women's" goals were often subordinated to those of a Civil Rights Movement led by men whose commitments to racial justice did not always extend to justice for women. Moreover, both "Searching for Southern Lesbian History" and "Second Wave Feminism(s) and the South: The Difference That Differences Make" tell us that feminists found themselves divided by class as well as race, since many blacks felt whites did not, indeed, could not, understand their experience. "Traditional" women, unwilling to relinquish the polarity of gender stereotypes, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Black women, more often fighting for survival than fulfillment, were generally more sympathetic to the ERA drive than were white women.

"Waiting for the Millennium, Remembering the Past: Appalachian Women in Time and Place" details the hardships of women who, despite isolation, did not escape the larger culture's prescriptions for ladylike behavior, beginning with deference to males. Women like Mother Jones worked at reform among the ethnically and politically divided people of the Virginia mining camps where white birth rates were the highest in Dixie. "A New Deal for Southern Women: Gender and Race in Women's Work Relief" reflects on the competition for jobs that exacerbated racial discrimination during and following the Depression era of the 1930s and points out how the histories of such organizations as FERA, CWA, and WPA illustrate women's abilities to step into directive roles previously the province of men.

These essays herald women's efforts toward the goals of those same white male settlers who (with their dutiful wives) persuaded Native American women to embrace Western European values. We read that the recent "spread of consumer culture" (267) and its concomitants of money and independence are important for the development of lesbian identities, yet Southeastern Indians made room for these sorts of cultural differences within supportive intergenerational communities hundreds of years ago. This book points toward a twenty-first century when women will regain the rights many of their own ancestors persuaded the southeastern Indians to surrender, thus suggesting a cyclic, rather than linear, progression of time. This ironic circling back throws into question the validity of the book's primary assumption that we are making progress. In its next edition, perhaps Farnham's collection will come full circle with the inclusion of an ecofeminist essay bridging the distance between this book's conclusion and its beginning. Such an essay might question the basic assumptions underlying these individual essays in which colonialism, acculturation, civil rights, suffragist, and ERA struggles are all discussed in similarly positive tones.