| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord, 1810–1879. By Leigh Fought. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xvi, 216 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8262-1470-3.)

Attempting the biography of an intellectual whose written records, other than her published essays, poems, and one play, were destroyed before her death presents a major challenge. Leigh Fought's book necessarily constructs most of Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord's life story from peripheral sources: the correspondence and business records of her parents, the letters her sister wrote to a school friend, the typescript of a daughter's memoir whose original is lost, and scattered letters in family collections. Moreover, she addresses the first half of McCord's life relying principally on a "psychological interpretation" and her adult years by omitting "three of the most important relationships in her life: with her husband, with her slaves, and with a divine being," for all of which there is little or no documentary evidence (p. 9). Consequently, "this biography primarily traces two themes in her life: slavery and the role of women" (p. 11), which constitute the substance of her most distinctive essays. (See Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, 1995.)

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