Book Review

Canada and the United States

Janet L. Coryell et al., editors. Beyond Image and Convention: Explorations in Southern Women's History. (Southern Women.) Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1998. Pp. x, 224. Cloth $37.50, paper $16.95.

Conventions of regional womanhood may have been rigidly and rigorously defined throughout the history of the American South, but southern women—white, black, Native American, and ethnic—have been singularly adept at countering, undermining, and using those conventions to their own advantage. That is the collective lesson taught by these two excellent collections of essays, edited by Christie Anne Farnham and by Janet L. Coryell, Martha H. Swain, Sandra Gioia Treadway, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner. Both make a dramatic case for the breadth of identities women were able to define for themselves in a culture all too often concerned with reinforcing gender, race, and class boundaries and for the vociferous agency with which women of a wide range of backgrounds challenged, often with surprising success, the conventions purporting to tell them who and what they were. Not incidentally, these two volumes also demonstrate the benefits of writing southern women's history more inclusively: their chorus of female voices ranges far beyond the narrow confines of white southern belles and black domestics.	1
The chief strength, in fact, of Farnham's collection is its striking breadth; it does indeed move, as Farnham argues in her preface, "beyond a biracial focus on the region's past" (p. ix). Consisting of seventeen essays, only one of which (Anne Firor Scott's useful "Writing the History of Southern Women") has been previously published, this volume includes portraits of Choctaw and Cherokee women serving as cultural innovators and opponents of removal, devout Jewish women adapting and revising the ideology of Republican motherhood, Moravian Single Sisters achieving economic and personal autonomy, elite white women who helped reconstruct white southern manhood with their commemoration activities, wives and daughters of Appalachian coal miners, "race women" whose private lives contradicted their public teachings of conventionality, African-American clubwomen setting the stage for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, grass-roots members of Marcus Garvey's numerous United Negro Improvement Association divisions, New Deal administrators determined to provide women with worthwhile work, lesbians often forgotten or shunted aside in women's histories, and second-wave white and black feminists whose failure to construct a genuinely interracial feminist movement underscores the need to rethink feminist histories. These essays do a service by unearthing previously untouched primary sources and pointing the way toward new directions in researching southern women's history, from an examination of charities and social control over white nonelite women in Savannah to connections to be made between 1970s feminism and early African-American pioneers like educator Anna Julia Cooper.	2
If Farnham's volume offers breadth, the one edited by Coryell et al. offers in-depth glimpses of southern women by focusing largely on individual portraits of rebellion and nonconformity: on women, the introduction says, who felt compelled "to defy the norm" (p. 8). Including nine essays originally presented at the Third Southern Conference on Women's History, held at Rice University in 1994 under the auspices of the Southern Association for Women Historians, this collection sets its sights on sexually adventurous women in colonial North Carolina, uppity housekeepers who subtly challenged the authority of their exasperated mistresses, eighteenth-century Methodist women empowered to speak out and to lead by virtue of their religious enthusiasm, slaves who managed to test the limits of white control and extend their own sense of authority, an African-American woman who challenged white definitions of freedom and slavery in the courts, African-American sorority women whose volunteer work in public health led them to offer economic critiques of the Mississippi status quo, and white elite activists who used their social status to challenge the racism of their communities.	. . .