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Joan E. Cashin, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 540–541, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486301
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This collection of articles by LeeAnn Whites focuses on gender in nineteenth-century America. The book includes her much-cited essay, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” which suggests new ways to conceptualize the war, and fourteen other articles on a range of topics: politics, labor, agriculture, reform, sexuality, women's organizations, historical memory, and the career of Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. Some of the essays are new, while others have been published before. The articles treat the South, the North, and the border regions, although most of them concern the South; some of the articles reach well into the twentieth century, but most cover the second half of the nineteenth century.
Professor Whites is interested in relations between the sexes, the multiple ways that race and class have affected those relations in historical settings, and how those relations have changed over time. Each essay is rich with insights. The prose is uniformly excellent, and the entire book is a pleasure to read. Among the best articles in the collection are: an essay on white women in Missouri during the Civil War, when partisans on both sides tried to ascertain people's loyalties by informal surveillance in daily life; an essay on the controversy at the University of Missouri over the Confederate memorial, a big rock placed on campus by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1935, removed by the city of Columbia in 1974, and the subject of debate ever since; and an essay on the writings of Clare de Graffenried, a white Southern expatriate and investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Labor, who called for better conditions for female mill workers in nineteenth-century Georgia.
