| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood: Dealing with the Powers That Be. Ed. by Janet L. Coryell, Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Anastatia Sims, and Sandra Gioia Treadway. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. 251 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8262-1295-6.)

The Southern Association for Women Historians began publishing anthologies of essays taken from its conventions in 1988. All have been well received, and the fourth, Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood, representing Charleston's 1997 convention, will prove to be no exception. This is partly because the field of southern women's history has become a dynamic and significant area of research that is making major contributions to scholarship through examination of all the region's women—not just slaves and ladies—and analysis of the implications of their struggles to carve out some limited areas of autonomy. The result is a much more nuanced, multilayered understanding of southern society. Class was always subordinated to race and gender, which remained the dominant categories of southern social organization; but it is wrong to assume that southern women were always victims, for prevailing categories could be used to maintain as well as challenge status, as these essays demonstrate. 1

The anthology's eleven chapters range from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century and from Maryland to Texas. About equally divided in focus between blacks and whites, they examine women from different class positions. The theme that unites the collection is the development of strategies to maintain or achieve status. . . .

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