In the early 1980s, the history department at my university contained many famous names but few women faculty, mostly congregated in two departments: women's studies and art history. Thirty-five years later, I returned to the campus with the germ of a project in US southern history and questions about its potential. The history department still contained famous names, but many were now women, a change mirrored across disciplines and across higher education. As I cultivated my germ into a seedling and transplanted it to a graduate history program, a series of senior women historians watered and fertilized it: recommendations, lodgings, panel or publication opportunities. While immensely grateful for their generosity, I had no inkling that this assistance stemmed from a consciously designed culture of mentorship created to nurture the success of women historians in one subfield of American history. But that is the story revealed in Sisterly Networks: Fifty Years of Southern Women's Histories.

As suggested by the subtitle, this edited collection of essays recounts multiple histories. Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH), the authors recount the organization's formation in a hotel basement and its development into an effective promoter of its members. In so doing, they also narrate the emergence of women's histories as not just a valid subject for study, but a crucial component for a fuller understanding of a period and place – a transformation nicely summarized in the historiography of Catherine Clinton's introduction. Finally, the writers relate their own personal histories of growth and development. They present individual and communal moments of frustration and joy, embarrassment and excitement – a chance for the reader to discover that even the most eminent professor was once a nervous graduate student attending their first conference.

The key theme running through these narratives is the effort to construct a sisterly network. Reacting to the competitive one-upmanship and exclusionary panel selections they experienced at other conferences, the SAWH founders and leaders promote, in Clinton's words, “a transformative model of scholarship that is collaborative, supportive, and capacious” (14). As described by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, it is a culture that stresses invitation, mentorship, connectivity, and collaboration, while rejecting elitism, hierarchy, and gatekeeping.

This idea of the sisterly network provides not only historical insight but also constructive counsel for scholars today. In the book's concluding essay, Gilmore presents a primer on mentorship. For example, the payment of their graduate students’ SAWH dues by faculty members both recruits new blood into the organization and visibly demonstrates the advisers’ commitment to and confidence in their students’ professional future. Catherine Clinton and Melissa Walker offer valuable advice for those embarking on their first visit to an archive or attendance at an academic conference respectively, while Cherisse Jones-Branch demonstrates the process of “cultivating and utilizing community connections” to unearth the voices and stories absent from the archive (77).

Of course, no book or organization is ever perfect. The contributors are quick to describe the organization's missteps around race, noting both sins of omission and commission, but they also narrate the steps taken to remedy and prevent repeat occurrences. Thus the book carefully reserves space for women of color. Yet, even with that lesson, a similar omission occurs in the book with regard to same-sex and LGBTQIA scholars and subject matter outside a brief paragraph in Clinton's introduction. What tensions have arisen as “Southern women's history has come out of the closet” in the twenty-first century (5)? How has the SAWH supported this new work and the scholars pursuing it? What are the shared experiences between these different generations of historical pioneers and what has changed due to the impact of the SAWH on the subfield of southern history?

Still, despite this gap, Sisterly Networks will appeal to multiple readers. Participants in the events described can rediscover old friends. Scholars interested in the experiences of women historians during the latter half of the twentieth century will encounter a logical companion to similar edited volumes, such as Clio's Southern Sisters: Interviews with Leaders of the Southern Association for Women Historians (2004) or the more recent No Straight Path: Becoming Women Historians (2019). For current graduate students and those advising them, there are valuable tips and hints. Finally, the book offers practical inspiration to the leaders and members of any organization that the old way is not the only way. New voices, new ideas, and new approaches can refresh and renew professions and institutions in ways that are healthier, more creative, more inviting, and definitely more fun.