| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 205 words from this article are provided below; about 601 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kirsten E. Wood. Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 281. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

In the Old South, ostensibly immutable differences in class, race, and gender marked elite white men as natural leaders. Yet occasional rights claimed by poor white men and even slaves challenged those "natural" boundaries, bringing into question how elites maintained authority. Kirsten E. Wood offers new insights into this power structure by singling out one exceptional group, slaveholding widows, and exploring how fully they maintained social position after the deaths of their elite white husbands. In a well-written study based chiefly on a close reading of the correspondence and personal accounts of this group, Wood argues that above all else southern elites prioritized the "mystique of privilege" (p. 179), and thus granted widows the rights of mastery due them by their slaveholding status rather than denying them such because of their gender. Although the sources are too incomplete to make Wood's answer definitive, her compelling analysis, clearly connected to the current scholarship, make this book an important contribution to the field.

. . .

There are about 601 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.