Book Review

Canada and the United States

In 1997, the Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History at the University of Mississippi brought together eleven scholars who have, individually and collectively, shaken the pillars of southern political history by viewing everything from Bacon's Rebellion to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) through an interpretive lens focused strongly on gender. The common assumption of the authors of the book under review is that an expanded definition of politics—one that views women and the disenfranchised as political actors, that marks the interconnections between the world of public life and households, that ponders the relationship between domestic violence and the power of the state, that considers the gendered responses of workers to integration—can reshape our understanding of the central events of southern history.	1
Like many published collections, this book's essays were produced originally as conference papers. Unusually, editor Nancy Bercaw has also published the comments of the respondents. The inclusion of the comments is pedagogically interesting: not every book includes a critique of its basic premise. This is provided by Winthrop Jordan, who seems to consider gender analysis the intellectual equivalent of inserting a quarter into a machine at the end of the bed: it may shake up interpretations in the short term, but it won't change anything in the long run. As he puts it, "No matter how powerfully persuasive a gender-oriented argument can be . . . it does not shift gears easily into other, and especially broader, levels of generalization" (p. 60). Reading this book, students may come to their own conclusions about whether or not gender is more inherently limited than other categories of analysis, including race, religion, ideology, and class.	2
The six essays cover a broad sweep of time, from the colonial era through the 1970s. The book begins with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's conference keynote address, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique." This essay explores the politics of history, by which Hall means "both the use of history as a technique of power and the search for a past that provides a sense of agency and a lever for critique" (p. 3). Tracing both through the interwoven lives of Elizabeth and Katherine Lumpkin, Hall calls for a reconceptualization of history and, just as important, of historical writing. Writing with her characteristic grace and clarity, Hall seems likely to accomplish both goals.	3
Of the five remaining essays, three are freestanding and two are linked thematically. The essays by Kathleen Brown on Bacon's Rebellion and by Stephanie McCurry on the Confederacy may be profitably read together as meditations on the manufacture of political obligation in time of social transformation. Bacon's supporters defended their actions primarily as their duty as husbands and fathers; by the end of the rebellion, "the duty to protect one's household and provide for one's dependents had become not just the mark of manhood, but the mark of Englishness, defined by an identity that coursed in the 'bloud'" (p. 54). Both concepts were crucial to secessionists, who tried to convince non-slaveholders to "strike as men strike, who strike for their hearths and firesides" (p. 99) while warning that failure to act would result in the forfeiture of white racial privileges (p. 101). Demonstrating the malleability of the definition of the household and its relation to broader civic rights, both essays show how changes in the one could force alterations in the other, particularly in moments of social revolution.	. . .