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"Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph": Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities, edited by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond, features essays focused on individual women and their relationships to the established structures governing their lives: marriage, family, school boards, courts, and local, state, and national governments. The volume's entries work collectively to chart the numerous ways in which women have resisted and reconstituted those structures. Grouped under four roughly chronological headings--"The Private World," "The Civil War Era," "The Segregation Era," and "The Era of Social Change"--the book's essays fall into one of two categories: those focused on particular Southern women and those devoted to a particular Southern organization, location, or idea. In most cases, individual experiences allow reflection about broader issues: What can we learn about the institution of marriage in the 18th-century South from the rebelliousness of the famous diarist William Byrd's wife, Lucy Parke? How did Sarah Morgan's brief career as a newspaper columnist work to redefine the role of single women in the postbellum South? What do the roles of nuns in educating young women in St. Augustine, Florida, in the middle of the 19th century tell us about regionally inflected attitudes toward Catholicism? What happens to our understanding of the civil rights movement when we read side-by-side portraits of its individual black and white players (Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma McGee, Anne Braden, and Vivion Brewer), virtually unknown to each other and to most accounts of the era, yet vitally important to the movement as it played out around them? Essays focused on groups of people offer an inviting range of topics: Anya Jabour studies the phenomenon of the antebellum "college girl"; Karen Cox charts the rise to power of the United Daughters of the Confederacy; Glenn Feldman examines the tacit power of women in the Ku Klux Klan; Pamela Tyler investigates the ambivalent relationship of Southern women to Eleanor Roosevelt. The volume closes with a strong essay by Michelle Haberland, "After the Wives Went to Work: Organizing Women in the Southern Apparel Industry," that unites many of the strands running throughout the collection. Focusing on the Vanity Fair sewing factory in Jackson, Alabama, Haberland traces efforts there at union organization, clearly illustrating race as a variable that made the plant a microcosm of the tensions and changes surging against its walls. Without exception, Clayton and Salmond's selections are superbly researched and well written, a rarity in the world of essay collections, routinely uneven in quality. Yet nothing in the book is more valuable than Anne Firor Scott's introduction, in which she recounts changes in the field of women's history since she has been engaging in its practice, including an 11-point list that ranges from a discussion of topics and sources to the practitioners themselves. Her overview is useful in reminding us just how important this work is, and just how recently the academy, and American culture more generally, didn't know that. Kathryn McKee
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