Young women in the Old South spent a great deal of time and ink contemplating and even trying to forestall the nearly universal fate of elite white women in the nineteenth-century American South: marriage, children, and a precarious perch on the pedestal of southern white womanhood. They have found a humane and insightful interpreter in Anya Jabour, who argues convincingly that age was as important to the experience of these young women as were their race, gender, and class, and (somewhat less convincingly) that young women sometimes used the materials of the southern feminine ideal to fashion resistance.

The first quarter-century of life for most elite women was “a lengthy process of transformation that encompassed multiple stages of life, each marked by distinctive rites of passage” on the way from girlhood to matronhood (3). Jabour follows her subjects through girlhood, school life, single life, courtship, engagement, marriage, and motherhood. Most importantly, Jabour finds that their experiences at all-female academies provided young women with “the building blocks of a female youth culture of resistance” (82). Similarly, she finds that many young women contemplated a life of “single blessedness,” and used the ritual of “turning out” into society and the process of courtship to extend and enjoy their singleness, realizing “the potential drawbacks of marriage” (135). And because bad husbands were in such plentiful supply, belles held out for the perfect match, hoping that the attachments of love would soften the practice of patriarchy (168).

But, as Jabour writes, love “proved to be a shaky basis on which to build egalitarian marriages in the Old South” (173). Marriage was the death knell of the culture of resistance that young women had cultivated from their school days. Married women learned to manage households and frequently migrated away from family and friends with their fortune-hunting husbands, increasing their emotional dependence on their frequently absent mates (211). It was not until they underwent the harrowing process of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood that women finally stopped looking back to the ephemeral ideal of single blessedness and instead “adopted a new identity that revolved around maternity” (217).

As it did with everything else, the Civil War also disrupted the gender norms of the antebellum South, and it is Jabour's analysis of the war years where her focus on age earns its explanatory stripes. Wading into the debate over whether women largely supported or undermined the Confederacy, and whether the war reinforced or weakened the southern feminine ideal, Jabour argues that during the war young female Confederates fashioned a new ideal, the “rebel lady,” which incorporated some decidedly unladylike traits in support of the Confederate cause. Rebel ladies vociferously advocated Confederate independence (perhaps seeing a “parallel … [to] their own attempts at resistance,” 249), prolonged singleness (with the excuse that all the men were off fighting), and harbored ferocity (only towards the hated yankee). The war years allowed the long-simmering “youth culture of resistance” to boil over into “outright rebellion” against the feminine ideal in a way that widened the arena of possibilities for southern women in the postwar era (280).

The power of Jabour's portrait of young women in the South is not at all lessened by the fact that she is aware of the limitations of their resistance. She acknowledges that young southern women “developed a piecemeal critique of male dominance” but did not develop a coherent theory of equal rights (13). Even during the war, with her subjects in “outright rebellion” against the southern feminine ideal, Jabour acknowledges that most young women gave vent to their unladylike hatred of the yankees only in their diaries (260). In fact, most of the acts of resistance that Jabour catalogues were enacted with a pen and in private. Important as these may be, the book's true contributions lie elsewhere. Despite assertions of a “youth culture of resistance” and “outright rebellion” it is finally Jabour's evocative account of the cultural complexities and paradoxes with which young southern women struggled in their becoming that makes Scarlett's Sisters such an important piece of scholarship.