| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Christine Jacobson Carter. Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800–1865. (Women in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. x, 220. $35.00.
Because the majority of women through time have married, the never wed remain on the periphery of family and women's history, rarely the focus of scholarly inquiry or integrated into social analyses. In her study of antebellum southern spinsters, Christine Jacobson Carter argues for their centrality as "the glue" that kept "elite social networks as well as individual families intact." They were the "communicators, caretakers, surrogate mothers, family servants, and benevolent women extending feminine virtues to individuals and organizations," holding kith, kin, and community together (p. 7).	1
Rooted in economic security and respected connections, Carter's subjects engaged in rich social, spiritual, and intellectual lives centered in a coterie of like-minded and similarly situated sisters and friends. Even as they occasionally imagined themselves called to politics or war, they rarely pined for occupation. Self-governing in homes of their own, and familiar members of families and communities, they felt confident of their usefulness and social integration. Viewed on occasion as individually eccentric, the "ever-single" garnered public appreciation for their contributions to families, churches, and benevolent institutions.	. . .

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