| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lucy Somerville Howorth: New Deal Lawyer, Politician, and Feminist from the South. By Dorothy S. Shawhan and Martha H. Swain. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xx, 234 pp. $42.95, ISBN 0-8071-3133-4.)

With this biography, Lucy Somerville Howorth, a Mississippi native, women's rights activist, attorney, judge, state legislator, Democratic insider, and federal appointee of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy, takes her rightful place in U.S. feminist history. Dorothy S. Shawhan and Martha H. Swain's treatment of Howorth, whom they knew personally, illuminates the multigenerational evolution of twentieth century feminism and the central roles Howorth and her associates played in the advancement of a new liberal politics that emphasized universal human rights and economic justice. While the book chronicles the emergence of a modern woman, Howorth remained rooted in the late nineteenth-century South through the influence of her mother, Nellie Nugent Somerville, a powerhouse in women's temperance and suffrage movements, and the first woman elected to Mississippi's legislature. Side by side, mother and daughter learned the intense level of combat required to establish even modest beachheads in battles for women's rights and against gender discrimination. The transference of feminist missions from one generation to the next is a part of women's history that needs further attention, and its treatment here is one of the principal contributions of the book.

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