| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jane Turner Censer. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood 1865–1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 316. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95.
Few topics continue to intrigue historians so much as the impact of the Civil War, especially on the former Confederate States. Jane Turner Censer reexamines the ideas of Anne Firor Scott's path-breaking The Southern Lady (1970) through a careful look at three generations of women in North Carolina and Virginia. Censer focuses her study on so-called "elite women," defined as those from families who owned more than fifteen slaves. This study relies on women's diaries and letters, the published writings of women, and the published writings of their male friends and relatives. These source materials reiterate the elite nature of the sample, but Censer notes that the education and status of privileged women gave them opportunities that their contemporaries did not enjoy.	1
Censer divides her sample by generations: women who were forty years old or already had adult children at the outbreak of the war; a second generation born between 1820 and 1850; and a younger generation. Not surprisingly, Censer found that the experiences for each group were different. She makes a strong case that, immediately following the Civil War, elite women actually critiqued southern society and the traditional view of southern women as "belles." They experimented with a more independent and achievement-oriented lifestyle and with new definitions of race relations. Toward the end of the century, however, more traditional views of southern women began to reassert themselves.	. . .

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