| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895. By Jane Turner Censer. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xviii, 316 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8071-2907-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2921-6.)
Confederate defeat and emancipation transformed the southern household, drawing black and white women into the work of Reconstruction. For many years, aside from Anne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady (1970), the emphasis of historians on party politics obscured how southern women helped to reshape the South after the Civil War. Recent studies by scholars such as Laura Edwards, Leslie Schwalm, and Tera Hunter, however, have greatly expanded our understanding of women's participation in this crucial period of southern history.	1
Jane Turner Censer's intelligent and well-documented book, focusing on the experience of elite white women in postwar Virginia and North Carolina, is an important contribution to this emerging body of work. In particular, Censer's analysis of how age shaped the differing experiences of elite women provides a fresh perspective on the postwar South. By dividing the women into three cohorts—those born before 1820, those born from 1820 to 1849, and those born from 1850 to 1869—she shows that the younger generations enthusiastically endorsed the new ethic of "nondependence," but older women did not adjust as easily to the demands of the postbellum years.	. . .

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