| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800–1865. By Christine Jacobson Carter. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xii, 220 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-252-03011-7.)

The highest ideal, and perhaps the only acceptable position, for a woman in the antebellum South was as a wife and mother. Not only were there few opportunities for women outside the family economic unit, but challenging the southern ideology that upheld women's dependence on men also challenged other dependent relationships in the South, such as slavery. However, according to Christine Jacobson Carter, at least some women purposefully chose single blessedness and constructed lives that were still acceptable to southern society by reinforcing southern ideals of womanhood even in their unmarried state.

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