" From Gone with the Wind to Designing Women, images in film and fiction tend to obscure the diversity of American women below the Mason-Dixon line. In a work that lays bare many myths and stereotypes, Margaret Ripley Wolfe offers the first professional synthesis of southern women's experiences across the centuries. In telling their stories, she considers many lives -- those of Native-American, African American, and white women from the tidewater and Appalachia to the Gulf Coastal Plain and Mississippi Delta, women whose varied economic and social circumstances resist simple explanations. Here are stories of wives, mothers, pioneers, soldiers, suffragists, politicians, and activists -- women with ambition, grit and endurance.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Stories of Southern women prisoners, prostitutes, soldiers and farm and factory workers supplement better-known tales of first ladies and plantation mistresses in Wolfe's synthesis of Southern women's history. A professor of history at East Tennessee State University, Wolfe draws on scores of written sources to present Southern women's lives from the early 17th century to the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1950s and '60s. She replaces the Scarlett O'Hara image of indolent, aristocratic Southern women with images of women who suffered extreme poverty, deprivation and hard work. Native American and African American women are represented significantly; Mexican-American and Cuban-American women receive sparser treatment, perhaps understandably. Wolfe has tried to cobble together a broad historical narrative out of too many monographs, and the result is thin: the cursory descriptions of many individual women's stories give little sense of the far-reaching social and historical changes their stories represent. Also her writing tends toward cliche: "Alluring as the fantasy of a mint-juleped South may have been for a depression-weary population, most Southerners of the interwar years rooted themselves in terra firma and stoically confronted life's vicissitudes."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The literature on Southern women and their role in U.S. history is widespread and fragmented. Taking a not entirely restrictive chronological approach, Wolfe has produced the first modern holistic and synthesized study. She not only considers the traditional highlights of women's history but also incorporates literary works, country music, and other sociocultural pieces of evidence specific to Southern women. Wolfe (history, East Tennessee State Univ.) has produced several local history studies of the state of Tennessee. At times her prose is a bit too stylistic and vague to be translated into a concrete idea. However, the evidence is there, and general readers and new scholars will find this wide-ranging book attainable as well as engaging. Recommended for general readers.?Jenny Presnell, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Concise, readable, broad-ranging and researched,
By Cynthia Whittington (Pearl, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Daughters Of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women (New Perspectives on the South) (Paperback)
A good introduction to/outline of the history of women in the South, crossing racial and class lines in the telling. This book proved to be concise and readable; I finished it in less than a week. As an under-30 Mississippian, my education in women's history is much of my own making, so the forty-eight pages of endnotes were comforting to me, suggesting that the book has been well-researched. I would recommend it to the literate general reader as a springboard into further reading (I plan to find a book with more in-depth coverage of African American women's history ASAP). The most fascinating surprise of it was the discussion of labor movements and YWCA work in the 1920s and 1930s.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well researched with wonderful insight on obscure topic.,
By Beverly Bell Sambat (Johnson City, TN United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Daughters Of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women (New Perspectives on the South) (Paperback)
This is a subject the author knows better than any other could possibly know. The book gives evidence of thorough research and personal involvement. As a former student of Dr. Wolfe, I was able to experience first-hand the history of Tennessee brought to life. Daughters of Canaan fortunately focuses on real southern women and their tribulations and triumphs. If you can't meet Dr. Wolfe in the classroom, this book is the next best thing to being there.
1 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
boring saga of dull southern women,
By A Customer
This review is from: Daughters Of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women (New Perspectives on the South) (Paperback)
This book is one which should never have been written. Wolfe's writing is almost adequate, but the subject is a loser
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