Book Review

Taking Off the White Gloves: Southern Women and Women Historians. Ed. by Michele Gillespie and Catherine Clinton. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. xii, 187 pp. $27.50, isbn 0-8262-1209-3.)

Initially, Beyond the Household and Taking Off the White Gloves appear to have little in common other than their focus on southern women. The first is a richly textured study of changing gender conventions for elite and middling white women in Virginia and the Carolinas from 1700 to 1835, as they relate to the public sphere, broadly defined; the second is a collection of ten speeches, some previously published, on a variety of subjects presented before annual conventions of the Southern Association for Women Historians. Yet both volumes are bound together by two pervasive concerns: they share the commitment to gender equality that animates women's history, and they cannot escape the long reach of the shadow of race that is ubiquitous in southern history.	1
It is the growth of slavery, for example, that, concomitantly with the decline of white servitude, made possible the development of a colonial culture of gentility. Cynthia A. Kierner's Beyond the Household demonstrates that the resulting decline in women's access to courts and markets during the 1700s was offset by this development, because it afforded some women opportunities to influence both the form and the content of public life. The larger forces of commercialization and economic growth that undergirded this change also were strengthened by the ability of genteel sociability to enhance the authority of elites.	2
The Revolution brought a reaction to genteel culture by equating it with monarchical European values; but, again, as some forms of political activity were discredited, others were encouraged. Colonial boycotts and domestic manufactures depended upon women's political consciousness. Nevertheless, the general trend was toward the redefinition of public virtue as a masculine value, a movement reinforced by the conflation of feminism with the excesses of the French Revolution.	. . .