| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. By Anya Jabour. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. x, 374 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3101-4.)
Anya Jabour makes a compelling case in Scarlett's Sisters that age and generation are as important as class, race, and gender as categories of analysis, and that adolescent girls and young women are particularly situated to shed light on many of the questions southern historians have been debating for decades. Weaving together writings by more than three hundred white, well-to-do girls and women, aged 15 to 25, from across the South, Jabour's chapters reflect the life stages of those females: adolescence, college life, the return home, courtship, engagement, marriage, and motherhood.	1
With this book, Jabour jumps into a major historiographical debate about white southern women: were they "resigned" to their fates and the inequities of their culture, or were they "resistant"? Jabour says that a culture of resistance defined their perspectives, at least until (and sometimes after) the women married. Girls entered their teens, having been taught that their sex was "cheerfully submissive, genuinely devoted to the desires of others, and satisfied to earn their reward in heaven rather than on earth" (p. 45). But going away to school allowed them a different reality. There they nourished female friendships, stretched their minds (rather than perfected their domestic skills), and resisted southern patriarchy and the future that awaited them.	. . .

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