Customer Reviews

Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Gender and American Culture)

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This book is a mind-blower. It reveals the history of white supremacy as an overt political campaign in the South in the early 20th century, and more importantly the roles that middle-class black women self-consciously assumed in this very dangerous cultural arena. Historins talks a lot about ideology and race and agency, but this is the most skillful and convincing account that I've read: by examining how people - men, women, poor, rich, black, white - understood and tried to shape their worlds, Gilmore recasts a significant portion of American history, and made me re-examine my assumptions about racism and gender and politics. I'm working towards my graduate degree in history, so I've had to read scores of books that cover similar ground - and this is the by far the best treatment that I've read. Also very important: Gilmore is an excellent writer - this text reads as smoothly and as compellingly as a novel. Can't recommend it highly enough.

As Gilmore writes (p. 1) in Gender and Jim Crow, "since historians enter a story at its end, they sometimes forget that what is past to them was future to their subjects." And with regard to black optimism, potential and opportunities during Reconstruction, African American "subjects" looked forward to a future of encouraging possibilities, as African American males had real political power and influence within the Republican and populist parties, which courted their votes. These men and women believed that race as a social classification would decline in importance in favor of class. Yet just as the hopes of Agrarian radicals were thwarted by the harsh the realities of the two-party system, so too were the dreams of Reconstruction-era blacks crushed by the resurgence of white supremacy and the systematic attempts by whites to disenfranchise the Negro. Gilmore presents this tale of high hopes and shattered dreams in her first chapter, "Place and Possibility."
Gilmore's story is one of perseverance among the increasingly subjugated blacks of North Carolina after Reconstruction ended, in particular, the struggle of middle class black women to maintain power, dignity and to some degree control over their lives and communities. By the 1890s, the ugly image of white supremacy showed its face, as white men fought a successful battle to disenfranchise black men through the instrument of fear, that is to say, fear for the safety of white women from the ravenous clutches of Negro rapists. As Gilmore details, this sexually based contrivance branded black men as beasts and drove them from the political realm. Articulate black women, she argues, stepped in to this cultural and political vacuum to coordinate with whites (especially white women and Northern reformers) to get social services and to work for "racial uplift," especially through church and voluntary associations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Gilmore notes that these types of activities were not as exposed to white restrictions or ire as overt political action, and thus helped to assure some success by these middle-class black females. It seems that black women could travel within certain community and political circles that were no longer open to their male counterparts.
Gender and Jim Crow is an innovative look at post-Reconstruction race relations, in that the chief actors in Gilmore's tale are women. It nicely dovetails with Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, in that we see similar examples of the creation of Jim Crow and the use of sexual fears to bolster notions of white supremacy as well as white political solidarity. While Kantrowitz shows that Ben Tillman was representative of many of white Southerners of his day, I am unconvinced that Gilmore's subjects are as representative. Her geographic realm is limited to one state of the Upper South, North Carolina; did black women carve out a similar role for themselves in the Deep South as well? Additionally, her cast of characters is quite small, and perhaps we are drawn to these women and their story because of its very exceptionalsim and not its typicality. Nevertheless, Gilmore's new and nuance perspective is groundbreaking and valuable in that we see the era of Jim Crow from a viewpoint previously unexplored.

Gilmore breaks new ground on many fronts that will interest social historians of race and political historians. She uncovers the myriad arenas in which black women and white women pursued "politics" outside the formal arenas of electoral institutions. She also reveals the surprising coalitions formed across racial lines and the mindset of an upper-South State on the eve of disenfranchisement. Gilmore's writing flows smoothly, as other reviewers have noted, but at times becomes overwrought and sentimentalized in a way that makes it sometimes tedious and sometimes aggravating to stay with the text. She's become captured a bit by her characters and sources. But this is a small criticism in the context of an overwise pathbreaking study that's well worth the read.

The influence of sex on gender is often mistakenly emphasized to the extent where sex and gender are seen as synonyms. Historian Glenda Gilmore challenges this aberration by re-examining the formative years of Jim Crow in North Carolina through the lens of middle-class African American Women. Her reconstruction of this assumed history demonstrates acute gender construction divergences based on race, class, and political circumstance. Gilmore discloses the dynamics of marriage, education, and above all hope in shaping the differences between gender construction between African Americans and whites.
The racial progressive momentum of Reconstruction shaped educated African American women to uplift their race in an effort to improve living standards for their families, to open up opportunities for their sex for both races, and to change white attitudes toward African Americans. By accenting the life of Sarah Dudley Petty, Gilmore reveals that her activism as a "feminist" and as an African American was in contrast to white women because black women were responding not just to patriarchy but to racial oppression as well.
A famous example of how African American women hoped to uplift their race was through their work in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). This organization provided North Carolina's black women "their best hope for building strong communities and securing interracial cooperation" (32). The WCTU became a point of mutually for both whites and blacks to improve community and gender equality. When black men voted, white women welcomed and sought out the activism of black women. Political circumstance for both groups of women afforded a glimmer of hope that racial equality was possible, however, as the political circumstance changed under the swagger of Jim Crow, white WCTU members got behind white supremacist leaders.
Gilmore explains the gender construction of whites was molded by the downturn of the economy. As hard times hit the North Carolina agrarian economy, a reconsideration of racial parity was in quick demand and an explicit white supremacy movement formed to deny blacks all their gains from Reconstruction. The "New White Men" sought to reconstruct racial interaction, and in particular sexual interaction between the "races." Gilmore reveals that the White New Man effectively created a social norm where it was no longer a demonstration of strength to have sex with a black woman but a sign of weakness. New White Men now expected white women, across class boundaries, to be wholesome and chaste in order to maintain racial purity. In turn, white women began to hold the White New Men culpable for the previous generation that allowed for racial miscegenation transgressions. Such feminine pressure as expressed by the Waddell women, Gilmore argues, supplied the once ineffectual Alfred Waddell to lead the Wilmington slaughter and take the office of mayor of Wilmington.
In the dismal days after the successful drive of disenfranchisement, when black men were pushed out of the political and civic circles, Gilmore fruitfully uncovers how black women advanced the condition of African Americans. African American women took charge amidst the Progressive Era in women's missionary societies and volunteer organizations. Gilmore demonstrates how Black women were instrumental in the rise of the welfare state and how they shrewdly created political ties with white women in un-seemingly apolitical fashion.
Gilmore's reconstruction of a microcosm of race relations in North Carolina has revealed the larger aggregate on America's shameful history of racism and misogyny. Her emphasis on social influences of gender construction affords an effective analysis of the vibrancy of agency within the seemingly impregnable shadow of structure.

I loved this book. I recently read it to for a paper I was writing on woman's suffrage, and was initially concerned the focus on North Carolina would be too narrow to serve my purposes. However, Gilmore's research and analysis of the role played by black middle class women after Reconstruction and the multi-layered conflicts in southern society around enfranchisement, economic security and cultural and masculine identity is eye-opening. Gilmore's exposure and explanation of the invidious 'propaganda wars' conducted by white supremacists do much to explain regional antipathy to equal rights for both African Americans and women.
P. Abeles

Gilmore gives a voice to an otherwise obscure - not to mention forgotten- group that set the pace for the civil rights movements of the 1950's and 1960's. Countless women contributed tirelessly in the struggle against racism, illiteracy, disease and most notably, suffrage. Gilmore does justice to those who have gone unrecognized.

This book is sheer genius