From Gone with the Wind to Designing Women, images of southern
females that emerge from fiction and film tend to obscure the
diversity of American women from below the Mason-Dixon line. In a
work that deftly lays bare a myriad of myths and stereotypes while
presenting true stories of ambition, grit, and endurance, Margaret
Ripley Wolfe offers the first professional historical synthesis of
southern women's experiences across the centuries. In telling their
story, she considers many ordinary lives -- those of
Native-American, African-American, and white women from the
Tidewater region and Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the
Gulf Coastal Plain, women whose varied economic and social
circumstances resist simple explanations. Wolfe examines critical
eras, outstanding personalities and groups -- wives, mothers,
pioneers, soldiers, suffragists, politicians, and civil rights
activists -- and the impact of the passage of time and the pressure
of historical forces on the region's females. The historical
southern woman, argues Wolfe, has operated under a number of
handicaps, bearing the full weight of southern history, mythology,
and legend. Added to these have been the limitations of being
female in a patriarchal society and the constraining images of the
"southern belle" and her mentor, the "southern lady." In addition,
the specter of race has haunted all southern women. Gender is a
common denominator, but according to Wolfe, it does not transcend
race, class, point of view, or a host of other factors. Intrigued
by the imagery as well as the irony of biblical stories and
southern history, Wolfe titles her work Daughters of Canaan. Canaan
symbolizes promise, and for activist women in particular the South
has been about promise as much as fulfillment. General readers and
students of southern and women's history will be drawn to Wolfe's
engrossing chronicle.
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