| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Lynn M. Hudson. The Making of "Mammy Pleasant": A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. (Women in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 193. $29.95.
What did it take for Mary Ellen "Mammy" Pleasant, an impoverished, New England-born female, to negotiate her way through barriers of race, class, and gender to become a reformer and entrepreneur who was part of the black elite? Lynn M. Hudson attempts to answer this and other questions in her detailed and revisionist study of Pleasant's life and the myths about it.	1
Hudson pieces together Pleasant's life by uncovering the few primary sources that distinguish the facts from the myths previously told about her. If for no other reason than this, Hudson's biography is significant. In addition, she challenges historical assumptions about post-Gold Rush California as well as the romanticized version of black exploits in the West. In so doing, Hudson adds her voice to that of Anne M. Butler, whose pioneer historical work, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–90 (1985), revealed the harsh life of black women trying to survive on the western frontier with limited access to employment and upward mobility. Hudson, like Butler, meticulously combed through court records to set much of the story straight.	. . .

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