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REVIEWS
| Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. By Francesca Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xi plus 320pp.).
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| Since the emergence of women's history as a subfield, historians have been exploring female organizational activities. In recent years, however, scholarly attention has moved from women's rights associations, charities, and benevolent societies to a wider range of groups. To survey a range of women's patriotic beliefs and activities, Francesca Morgan focuses on four different late nineteenthcentury female organizations—the National Association of Colored Women, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Woman's Relief Corps. |
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One of these groups, the Woman's Relief Association, arose as an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Union army veterans association), and two others—the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—were formed as hereditary associations which demanded descent from a veteran as necessary for membership. The fourth organization, the National Association of Colored Women, was the major female African American national organization. Among these groups only the Woman's Relief Association had a racially integrated membership. |
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Morgan argues that the establishment of these organizations during the 1880s and 1890s represented a new phase for women. With the exception of the drive to restore Mount Vernon, earlier American women's patriotic gestures, in Morgan's view, typically had been linked to wars and the need to support the soldiers. All these changed after the 1880s as these new groups arose in peacetime to argue for women's importance in a plethora of patriotic endeavors. |
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