This wide-ranging collection of works about gender in American history from colonial times onwards raises interesting issues about the future direction of gender history. These include the extent to which gender history and women's history overlap, the necessity or desirability of narrative synthesis, and the problem of finding source materials for those traditionally excluded from historical interpretations. Although the scholarship displayed here is impressive, only a few authors have the confidence to tackle these issues head on, and it is a shame that so many works adopt the same, rather safe, formulaic format both within and between individual chapters. The majority of these books use a chronological perspective and most chapters begin with a representative vignette before moving on to examine relevant issues in a broader sense. However, within this collection overall, one can obtain a sense of the new and relevant issues of concern to gender historians, including notions of domesticity and what it meant for women as well as how it impacted upon them, the relevancy of the idea of separate spheres to both those in the past and more contemporary historians, the gendered dimensions of geographic space, an analysis into the meaning and relevancy of masculinity, the role of imagination in historical research, and, finally, the use of comparative techniques across time and space. There is some real innovative research displayed here.

Sharon Block's Rape and sexual power in early America is a broad study, encompassing a wide geographical area, a long time-frame (1700–1820), and a broad conceptualization of rape as both forced heterosexual intercourse and coerced sex. Unlike some other books in this collection, the chapters are structured by perspective rather than chronologically. In this sense, then, Block's work displays parallels with other important recent publications including Walter Johnson's Soul by soul (1999). Chapter 1 sets the theoretical and cultural context of the book by exploring the legal, religious, and print definitions of rape in early America. From a contemporary perspective, rape is viewed as a crime of violence, yet in early America boundaries between force and consent encouraged Americans to view rape as another form of illicit sex.

The second and third chapters examine the relationship between men's status and forced sex, arguing that men used their power to define sexual acts. Rape by fathers, husbands, neighbours, and strangers are all covered here despite the serious problem posed by a lack of documentary evidence. Block also brings in issues of more contemporary concern. For example, although the law did not allow for a definition of rape within marriage, the issue is covered alongside sodomy. She also makes use of a comparative technique in cleverly contrasting the rape experiences of Harriet Jacobs, enslaved in North Carolina, with Rachel Davis, a white servant in Pennsylvania. Block convincingly argues that what happens after coerced sex is equally important for our understanding of the racial and class dynamics, and this forms the basis of chapter 3, which claims the racialization of rape had gendered consequences for white women and that long after sexual acts social relations continued to create the meaning of encounters.

Chapter 4 is a strong chapter which again adopts comparative techniques. The legal punishment of rape was based on an English model. However, the racialization of America changed the cultural meaning of rape and American law therefore grew to differ from the British in terms of both sentencing and punishment. Here Block provides detailed and uncomfortable textual analysis of rape cases and punishments, exploring issues such as penetration, castration, and pregnancy. These themes continue into chapter 5, which details how race and rape were constructed in early American courts. Somewhat controversially, Block argues that despite the hardening of racial lines after the revolution, the prosecutorial treatment of black men accused of raping white women remained consistent in the colonial period and Early Republic. Moreover, in punishing black on white rapes more severely than white on white or white on black rapes, courts helped fashion a society where all black men had a mark of sexual suspicion. These conclusions differ from those of other historians, most notably Diane Miller Sommerville, in Rape and race in the nineteenth-century South (2004).

Chapter 6 returns the focus to public discourse, where Block shows how in the eighteenth century ideas about Native American men as potential rapists declined, in contrast to the experience of black men. Block's conclusion is particularly impressive. She argues against the continued use of regional or chronological perspectives in moving American history forward. Only through using a multiplicity of sources and approaches can historical research progress, although as she admits herself, this often gives a less tidy, ‘messier’ story. Block is suggesting historians think laterally and should not necessarily seek neat narratives and clear chronological shifts. Overall, she has undertaken extensive and diligent primary research, especially in her comparison with early modern England, which is extensively cited in the footnotes. The analysis is sophisticated and erudite and Block uses a range of methodological techniques, in contrast to some of the other works in this collection.

Historians have increasingly asserted that separate spheres no longer provide an appropriate paradigm for the study of women in America and recent works such as Amy G. Richter's Home on the rails: women, the railroad and the rise of public domesticity, concur with this view. Like Block's book, this is highly original in its methodological technique, its overall framework, and in its conclusions. Richter argues persuasively that railroads provide a microcosmic prism through which one can explore gender and, in so doing, reach broader conclusions about the Victorian ideal of separate spheres. The monograph is nicely presented and contains some fascinating pictorial evidence. Richter claims that female passengers on the nineteenth-century railroad both challenged separate spheres and stood at the centre of the transition from Victorian to modern American culture, which displayed at its heart the ideal of ‘public domesticity’. Richter defines this as orderly, comfortable, and safe, neither feminized nor solely masculine. Chapter 1 places the railroad in a cultural context by examining narratives of travel upon them. Richter argues they reveal three trends: that railroads were forging a national space; that they reflected an expanding consumer ethos; and that they conveyed the challenges of the relationship between public and private life. The second chapter uses women's diaries, letters, and manuals to convey how the railroad transported the values of the private sphere into the public arena, while the third, exploring the idea of ‘home on the rails’ is theoretically the strongest. Here Richter shows how trains were frequently portrayed as domestic space and were therefore symbolic of the new public domesticity emerging in a variety of commercial settings. Drawing heavily on the ideals of George Mortimer Pullman, who viewed railroad cars as domesticated and moral public places, Richter argues the development of the railroad had more sinister implications; namely that racial segregation could be justified in the name of ‘comfort’ and ‘respectability’ for white passengers.

Chapter 4 traces the development of gender segregation on trains. The comfort of women was perceived in terms of domesticity while that of men was associated with business. Railroad workers are examined in chapter 5. Richter argues they were encouraged by companies to be ‘courteous’ and ‘gentlemanly’ but again, racism impacted upon railroad travel. African American female travellers were rarely treated with respect. Race also divided staff – conductors were normally white while porters were black. Chapter 6 considers the ‘new woman’ of the late nineteenth century in relation to contemporary notions of masculinity. The railroad was a place of ‘manly conquest’ and heroism and Richter illustrates how new ideas about masculinity and femininity reflected the shifting boundary between public and private realms both on the railroad and within broader society. Richter's notion of ‘public domesticity’ hence conveys an increasingly blurred line between public and private spheres as society grew more complex and consumerist. Her enthusiasm for the topic shines clearly through her elegant prose and, like Block, she utilizes a wide and eclectic range of primary sources in new and interesting ways. Particularly impressive is the scope of the study. Racial, class, and gender differences are fully integrated throughout, and Richter has ambitiously and successfully woven these themes into a topic more usually associated with more traditional business or economic history. This book illustrates how a broad approach which brings together seemingly disparate strands of American history results in new and exciting forms of synthesis.

Inspiring research and fascinating conclusions can also be found within Amy S. Greenberg's Manifest manhood and the antebellum American empire. While Richter considers gender in relation to the railroad, Greenberg uses gendered and cultural analysis to shed new light on the notion of ‘manifest destiny’. In contrast to many others, Greenberg claims the idea of manifest destiny continued to thrive after the US–Mexico war, and that debates over it were intrinsically linked to struggles over the meaning of American manhood and womanhood between 1848 and 1860. Like the preceding authors here considered, Greenberg also uses a wide variety of source materials, from letters and journals through to political cartoons and newspapers. In chapter 1, Greenberg argues manifest destiny was a malleable term that was linked to ideas about expansion, progress, and enlightenment as peaceful and natural processes. This chapter also explores filibustering and its role in exacerbating sectional tensions after the Mexican war. According to Greenberg the possibility of Nicaragua, Hawaii, or Cuba becoming a state seemed much more plausible after the war than before it.

The second and third chapters concentrate on Central America. Greenberg claims expansionist travelogues proliferated between 1848 and 1860, again strengthening her claim that manifest destiny was not declining after 1848. White American manhood, as chapter 3 argues, also played a role in promoting manifest destiny. Sam Houston, among others, conceptualized aggressive expansionism in sexual terms by connecting it to the fantasy of personal annexation to foreign women, depictions of whom tended to emphasize their beauty, availability, and sexuality. Like gender, then, race is also woven throughout this work in a similar way to Richter's work. Greenberg convincingly shows how the idea of American, white, Anglo-Saxon superiority was also used to justify expansion because ‘weaker races’ were in need of American guidance. Moreover, Latin American men were stereotyped as lazy, ignorant, cowardly, and sometimes effeminate. While Nativists divided over the issue of territorial expansion, in overall terms it reinforced the masculinity of American men.

Chapter 4 considers William Walker's filibustering in Nicaragua and how responses to his adventures were shaped by the contested nature of class and manhood in 1850s America. Walker personified the ideal of ‘martial’ manhood, which Greenberg contrasts with another ideal, manhood which was ‘restrained’. The latter was grounded within family, domesticity, and evangelical Protestantism while the former rejected many moral standards and revelled in physical strength and domination, although, as Greenberg herself admits, there could be areas of overlap. These terms are also important for her fifth chapter on the notion of the filibuster as pirate. Using the case study of Narcisco Lopez's expeditions to Cuba in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Greenberg explains how filibusters such as Walker and Lopez gained popularity among working men through attendance at public meetings which celebrated and authorized their masculinity via martial manhood.

The emphasis shifts in chapter 6 to womanhood. Greenberg argues white American women were notably absent from aggressive expansionism and that women's letters and writings – in contrast to those of many men – do not convey a sense that Latin America was the next step in America's manifest destiny. Martial manhood therefore drove expansionism in Latin America but not, according to Greenberg, in the Pacific. Here, as she argues in chapter 7, missionary activities rendered a vision of ‘restrained manhood’ more applicable, and her sophisticated comparative analysis sheds refreshing new light on this subject. Finally, Greenberg notes rather depressingly the continuing existence of martial manhood ideas in more recent American foreign policy. Overall, this author reaches broad and ambitious conclusions which, like the work of Sharon Block, often dispute prevailing historiographical trends. From a practical perspective, though, this book could have been improved, particularly where important images are reproduced rather small and are difficult to read.

The books by Sharon E. Wood and Lori D. Ginzberg move into the realm of smaller-scale studies. Wood, in The freedom of the streets: work, citizenship and sexuality in a gilded age city, uses a micro-history approach in her small, detailed study of Davenport, Iowa, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arguing for a ‘choose small, read everything’ approach, Wood reaches conclusions about gender in US history which transcend the scope of her study. Utilizing an analysis of the gendered dimension of space similar to that of Richter, Wood explains how Davenport's geography was gendered, illustrated through a study of how working women encountered urban life and sought to shape public policy. Taking prostitution as its starting point, the first chapter explores how prostitution districts caused spatial confusion on neighbourhoods. There was a shift in the geography of vice because the pattern of Davenport's urban development encouraged the movement of brothels from the outskirts to the heart of the city.

Chapters 2 and 3 are the strongest, and are also important historiographically in their consideration of the language of separate spheres. Such language masked the implied derogation of working women through the logic of dependence but not inferiority. Notably, then, when Davenport women formed the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW) on behalf of those who laboured outside the home they used gendered separation as a strategy to advance women's interests via their ‘lend a hand’ club. As elaborated in chapter 3, philanthropy represented a paradox in terms of spheres because the club became a significant factor in shaping the gendered geography and politics of Davenport. It is significant, too, that the five women who organized the ‘lend a hand’ club were unmarried and self-supporting. Wood suggests they did not fit the ‘typical’ profile of clubwomen of the 1880s as characterized by other historians. Like other authors considered in this collection, then, Wood is seeking to move forward the historiography on gender. Her work is also important in terms of the increasing attention being paid to unmarried women in America, exemplified by the books of Carter, and, to a lesser extent, Censer.

In chapter 4, Wood shifts her focus to prostitution, and provides detailed biographical evidence on six prostitutes in Davenport. She convincingly argues how money was crucial in the move to selling sex. Typically these women needed to provide for their children, but with failed marriages behind them and being deprived of male breadwinners there were few other options available. Chapters 5 and 6 are also quite specific. The former describes the police matron campaign while the national movement to raise the ‘age of consent’ in rape statutes is explored in the latter. Shockingly, in most of the US, the age at which a girl's consent protected a man from the charge of rape was just ten. Attempts to regulate prostitution are covered in chapter 7, and here a racial agenda becomes apparent because brothels run by African Americans in Davenport were not licensed. Another theme explored is the policy of sending girls placed in the hands of public authorities to private Catholic reformatories, known as ‘Good Shepherd’ homes, which forms the basis of the eighth chapter.

Finally, chapter 9 traces the downward spiral of downtown Davenport. Wood attributes this to the regulation of prostitution, whereby the area became a sexualized space for men. An attempt is made by the author to bring these somewhat disparate later chapters together in the conclusion, where she argues that as the image of working women changed, so did the perception of the danger signified by prostitution. Over time, women who worked for pay no longer faced the censure, and women prostitutes were increasingly cast as victims. The book is meticulously researched and contains fascinating and sometimes shocking life-histories. Moreover, in relating her small study's findings to broader historiographical theory, Wood's monograph has appeal to both lay readers and professional historians. It is unfortunate that some of the book reads like a series of small case-studies, and, at times, more breadth would have been valuable in terms of contrasting the Davenport experience with a more national picture.

The same might be said of Lori D. Ginzberg's Untidy origins: a story of women's rights in antebellum New York. Like Wood, Ginzberg's study is small scale and local in nature, but attempts to reach broader conclusions about gender in nineteenth-century American history. Ginzberg takes as her starting point the 1846 decision of six women in rural upstate New York to petition for the right to vote and equal rights. Using rather meagre evidence, she then traces the biographical details of these women in the first chapter, attempting to show that they were ordinary, rural women. The second chapter explores citizenship and what it meant for these women, while chapter 3 discusses Jefferson County, from where the petitioners came. Remote and isolated, Ginzberg argues these women were rooted in their land, community, and homes, but were also subject to various intellectual influences that inspired their ideas about rights. These ideas are further developed in chapter 4. Although all Protestants, the women's religious allegiances appeared malleable. Ginzberg also makes reference to other possible influences upon the women, including formal education, the reading of agricultural newspapers, agricultural societies and journals, and lastly the patriot war in Canada. However, as Ginzberg convincingly argues in chapter 5, there was little evidence for anti-slavery activity in Jefferson County, despite its traditional links with women's rights.

The book comes together in chapter 6 and the conclusion in summarizing how the petition of these women was put before the constitutional convention of June 1846 at Albany. Like Amy Greenberg in Manifest manhood, Ginzberg also draws upon more recent political concerns in concluding. While Greenberg's thoughts relate to the war in Iraq, Ginzberg makes reference to more domestic concerns including the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and same-sex marriage. One of the major strengths of this concise book is its honest admission of what historians do not and cannot know, especially when one is concerned with private and personal thoughts and the emotions of women in the past. Stephanie Camp, in Closer to freedom (2004), argued that the use of imagination where documentary evidence was lacking was a viable way forward for historians interested in the lives of those in the seemingly inaccessible past. Ginzberg's book shows us clearly how this can be achieved without compromising historical integrity.

Other historians restricted by their source materials choose to explore only the lives of those who did leave documentary evidence. For example, elite white women of the Southern states have long been of interest to gender historians and two recent books make for useful, if somewhat limited, additions to this literature. Jane Turner Censer, in The reconstruction of white Southern womanhood, 1865–1895, attempts to shift the focus away from often-studied antebellum women to the lives of those living in an altogether more difficult era. Censer's work is based on a comparison of elite women living in North Carolina and Virginia, and it is true that these states were different. Nevertheless, it would have been helpful to have had some broader comparisons, for example with the Deep South. The scope of the study also renders the title of the book a little problematic. Essentially this is a monograph about elite white women in two states but the title suggests something altogether wider in nature. These issues notwithstanding, Censer has undertaken extensive research into the lives of elite white women in three differing locales: Coastal Craven and New Hanover counties, North Carolina, and Fauquier County, Virginia. Building on her previous work including North Carolina planters and their children, 1800–1860 (1984), Censer utilizes a useful three-generational perspective in tracing women's life-cycles. Finding change to be the norm for younger women and more continuity among older women, her work is also well contextualized within a broader historiographical, if not geographical, framework.

Chapter 1 explores a range of issues, including education, courtship, marriage, and the increasingly sexual depiction of women in post-civil war romantic novels written by Southern women themselves. Censer argues that by the 1880s ideals of female character and behaviour were in a state of flux. The realm of domesticity forms the basis of the second chapter, and in her analysis of the malleability of this term, Censer's work compares well to the works by Richter and Greenberg. However, both of the latter use notions of domesticity to explore areas of history not traditionally associated with the term, rendering their research more innovative. In noting how Southern families often differed from a nuclear ideal, Censer's work also adds to the growing pool of literature on the role unmarried women played in society, a theme Wood also touches upon and Carter studies more explicitly. White women had to refigure their households following the loss of their slaves and become more adept and domesticated themselves. Fewer African American servants lived within white people's homes and servants also tended to be female, young, and mobile. White Southern women therefore learned to exert their own presence in their kitchens and households, facilitated by new technological innovations such as the cast-iron stove and new sewing and washing machines. Through their own actions, Southern elite women therefore increasingly fitted into the culture of domesticity and respectability in America.

Chapter 3 explores varying degrees of property ownership among women and here Censer's meticulous research finds continuity with the antebellum era. Unmarried women were also becoming increasingly involved in property and business. The fourth chapter examines women on plantations, their views, the positions they held, and their relationship to management. The hard realities of economic life meant that many moved away from the relative isolation a plantation life imposed. The focus shifts in the fifth chapter to an analysis of schoolteachers and female benevolence. Censer argues rising levels of, and access to, activities outside their homes represents one of the major changes in the lives of elite Southern women in the post-war era, and they served in a variety of roles. Some worked as governesses and teachers while others set up their own schools, orphanages, or memorial societies. Women also increasingly gained access to public areas such as libraries, churches, and stores. Benevolent activities were, therefore, largely related to family, religion, and education, and here a consideration of the ‘public’ nature of domesticity would have been useful.

Chapter 6 argues that elite Carolinian and Virginian female authors have received relatively little attention, despite the fact that many increasingly visualized themselves as writers. Motivations, of course, varied, but Censer cites earnings, achievement, and moral uplift as major goals. She also explores the literary arenas open to such women, including local newspapers, regional newspapers and magazines, and ‘national’ publishing. In a comment that still resonates today, Censer acknowledges that it was the unmarried and those with fewest domestic responsibilities who were the most successful on the national arena. This theme is continued in chapter 7, where she innovatively re-evaluates women's writing about the North and South, especially the way in which they tackled differences of race and class. The epilogue does a good job of bringing these wide-ranging themes together. Here, Censer claims the move into Jim Crow segregation onwards did not obliterate the diverse changes in women's lives since the Civil War, though it did challenge them into ‘acceptable’ forms. Thus in the lives of elite women, ‘domesticity’ prevailed. There is considerable biographical detail within this book and one gets the sense that Censer really empathizes with the women she has studied. Her research is extensive and meticulous, and despite the seemingly rather narrow focus on elite Southern women, through her emphasis on the impact of age, Censer could never be accused of generalizing about women's lives.

Another book which explores the lives of a particular group of women is Christine Jacobson Carter's Southern single blessedness: unmarried women in the urban South, 1800–1865. The author argues, quite rightly, that an investigation into the lives of unmarried women provides a unique perspective on a culture where the dependency of women as wives or daughters was the norm. However, as is true of Censer's book, the title is somewhat misleading. This monograph uses as a case-study the lives of single white women in the two eastern seaboard cities of Savannah and Charleston only. As Carter admits, these were good places to be an unmarried woman. Yet, in focusing only on these two urban areas questions of typicality will surely be raised, especially as, in a similar way to Censer, this work concentrates on women in the upper echelons of society who left the most documentary evidence. Taking the idea of the ‘cult of single blessedness’ as its starting point, Carter aims to explores the lives, families, and wider communities of single women and the scene is set in chapter 1 where she explains something about both cities and the single women within them. Chapter 2 explores ideology, where Carter argues white southern womanhood was built on loyalty to region, Christianity, conservative principles, and usefulness to one's family. Single women were therefore rendered paradoxical because while they embraced domesticity, they also stepped outside of it in defining their lives as well-read, well-connected, refined, and urban. Here, her book displays important parallels with the findings of Wood.

In their roles as sisters and aunts single women were able to achieve an integral position in their families, claims Carter in the third chapter, and many also had close relationships with their parents. Chapter 4 expands outwards to consider the friendships among single women and considers how notions such as ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ were defined in this era. Although important, Carter concludes that friendships were secondary to familial concerns. In the fifth chapter, the benevolent activities of single women are considered and helpfully contrasted with those of Northern women. The latter were much more likely to challenge the status quo according to Carter, whose findings here mirror those of Censer. The last chapter moves to a chronological perspective and looks at the changing role of single women in the Civil War, primarily through their opportunities for ‘usefulness’ in a climate of increasing concern about their existence. The book is an enjoyable read and paints a positive and appealing picture of single women's lives, in contrast with, for example, Block's horrific descriptions of sexual assault in Early America. However, much of the information is purely biographical and drawn from a rather narrow source base, despite Carter's best attempts to engage with relevant theory, and the work is at its strongest when it engages with broader comparisons.

Finally, Lives full of struggle and triumph: Southern women, their institutions, and their communities, edited by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond, consists of fourteen chapters by individual authors plus a foreword by John David Smith and an introduction by Anne Firor Scott. Scott usefully explains some of the main changes that have come about in writings on Southern women since the 1970s, many of which are relevant to this collection of books. The foreword, which overlaps somewhat with the preface, argues the essays illustrate an agency on the part of Southern women which has been largely neglected or undervalued in traditional historical analyses. Each article is therefore concerned with some aspect of change over time, be this personal, social, or institutional. Yet the book is not structured around these themes and instead seems to adopt a more standard chronological approach.

Part 1 contains four chapters concerned with personal change in the private world running from the eighteenth century through the reconstruction era. Paula A. Treckel considers the marriage of Lucy Parke Byrd and William Byrd II using eighteenth-century Virginian planter diaries. A volatile and difficult relationship, broken by Lucy's sudden death from smallpox, Treckel argues both spouses had differing ideas about domesticity and men's and women's roles within the family. The second chapter explores post-Civil War domestic ideas through the prism of one single adult woman writer named Sarah Morgan. Like Carter in Southern single blessedness, Giselle Roberts argues single life was depicted as a ‘noble choice’ for women. Warren Ellen's depiction in chapter 3 of the life of Blanche Butler Ames – a Northern woman who moved to Mississippi following wedlock to a politician during Reconstruction – conveys the extensive identification of women with the political careers of their husbands. The fourth chapter, where Anna Jabour describes the impact of female academies on Southern women's identity, is somewhat broader in scope. Drawing on scholarship from different contexts and engaging with comparative techniques, Jabour argues academies provided young women with a unique alternative to the nuclear family within a wider female community.

Part 2 explores the lives of women in the Civil War era rather than, as might be expected, women who engaged in social change. Orville Vernon Burton examines the lives of women on the home front in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Both white and black women, he argues, had more freedom and opportunities as well as more responsibility during wartime. In chapter 6, Barbara E. Mattick looks at the establishment of a school by the Catholic nuns of St Augustine. Picking up, again, on the theme of ‘single blessedness’, Mattick argues that the Nativism of the North had little hold in the Southern states. Lastly, Karen Cox examines the rise of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and its members. The chapter focuses on motivations for joining, members' aspirations, and the problems they faced, including reconciling rapid growth with exclusivity.

The era of segregation is covered in Part 3, and some readers may therefore question why an article on reconstruction is contained earlier within the book. There are also only two chapters within this section. In chapter 8, Glenn Feldman considers the relationship of women to the Ku Klux Klan. Although they could not be Klan members, women played an important role in the order, through emphasizing family values and community membership. Pamela Tyler explores the sometimes difficult relationship Southern women had with Eleanor Roosevelt in chapter 9. Because she socialized with African Americans and argued publicly for social change, Roosevelt put herself in opposition to many Southern women who supported the status quo.

Part 4 is entitled ‘the era of social change’ and contains five chapters. Here the focus moves much more towards a consideration of African American women as agents of social change in their own right, and oral history techniques are used extensively. For example, in chapter 10, Sarah Hart Brown shows how Esther Cooper Jackson, the executive director of the South Negro Youth Congress in the 1940s, pioneered many forms of social protest later adopted by Civil Rights activists. Thelma McGee, an African American woman who grew up in rural Mississippi, is considered in chapter 11 by Kathi Kern. Committed to ‘day-to-day’ concerns including family, work, and the church, Kern contrasts her experiences with that of activists such as Anne Moody. Chapter 12 again focuses on an individual, in this case Anne McCarty Braden. Catherine Fosl claims Braden, a white Southern activist often labelled as communist in the 1950s, can be seen as a bridge-builder in a variety of ways. These include across generations, between blacks and whites, and between liberals and the left.

Last to be considered in this series of case-studies is Vivion Brewer, president of the Women's Emergency Committee set up to open schools during the Little Rock crisis of 1957. Elizabeth Jacoway shows how Brewer played a central role in dismantling gender and race constructions in the city. Although outwardly Brewer seemed the embodiment of the Southern Lady, she never fully bought into that construct despite her status and societal expectations. Finally, in chapter 14, Michelle Haberland explores the role women played in workers' organizations within the Southern Apparel Industry. Taking a long-term approach from the late 1930s through the 1980s, Haberland stresses the sometimes complicated relationship between the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Civil Rights Movement, and the women's movement. In terms of its broad emphasis and time-scale, then, this last essay diverges from others in this section.

Overall, this collection of essays tends to emphasize the conservatism of Southern women. Despite the fact that, as Pamela Tyler argues so eloquently in chapter 9, there was no ‘one southern woman’, as a group, females in the South tend to have been characterized through their domesticity, support of family and community, and the wider status quo. The few exceptions to this rule have tended to come from the ranks of African Americans, some of whose lives are considered here. The collection is also a little imbalanced with the majority, but not all, of the essays focusing on individuals. There is also a rather patchy coverage of different time-frames, and it is not clear whether the book is arranged chronologically or thematically.

Moreover, it is surprising, the problems of source materials notwithstanding, how much of this book, and of others within this collection, are concerned with elite white women. This means many historians are tending only to add depth to existing historical knowledge and historiographical paradigms rather than moving in new and exciting directions. Historians of women might move forward instead through seeking new ways of examining the lives of those who have not left behind documentary evidence. Using a multiplicity of source materials, considering the relevancy of imagination, and thinking as critically about what we do not know as what we do, can only be of benefit to those interested in the role of gender in the American past.