| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875–1915. By Joan Marie Johnson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. xii, 229 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3095-2.)
Historians of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long recognized the influence of northeastern women's colleges. The Seven Sisters colleges offered advanced academic training and career preparation. Many graduates left imbued with a sense of duty to use their education for the betterment of society.	1
Joan Marie Johnson's study explores this educational and social phenomenon as it relates to a little-examined group: elite southern women. She argues that, unlike most of their counterparts who eschewed higher education or attended southern women's colleges closer to home, young southern women who went north for their education widened their academic and social perspectives. When they returned to the South, they brought new ideals and activist impulses with them.	2
Examining approximately one thousand southern students over a forty-year period and drawing on a wealth of personal correspondence between college women and their families, Johnson explores the evolution of southern students' attitudes at the Seven Sisters. Her detailed analysis comes to life, particularly in the students' own words. Their voices—sometimes defensive or homesick, other times excited or energized—personalize what Johnson sees as their transformative experiences in the North.	. . .

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