Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Women in American History)

Rating:
Summary: A Fresh Perspective on the Reconstuction South
Review: Laura Edwards adds another dimension to Reconstruction history with her community study of Granville County, North Carolina. Edwards uses gender and political analysis to show how reconstruction politics penetrated into private life. According to Edwards, elite white men viewed black men, and white and black women as dependents in the antebellum South. The Confederacy's defeat and the subsequent reconstruction of the former Confederate states endangered this existing system. Edwards uses post-war Granville County as a case study of white elite attempts at maintaining the antebellum political system. What sets Edwards' scholarship apart, however, is her examination of family and gender relations, as opposed to strictly political evidence. The accounts Edwards uses are both compelling and effective. This makes this book an important addition to reconstruction history, as well as an enjoyable and captivating read. The book is full of new evidence, as well as interesting revisions of previously used sources. Her deft analysis of post-war women's literature provides examples of prevalent gender roles. Moreover, Edwards argues that the Knights of Labor was created in order to reinforce these same roles. This books is intriguing, but one must resist the temptation to see Granville County as the entire South. Edwards provides an effective framework, but her study only speaks for one county in North Carolina. This does not, however, diminish the importance of this book, or the influence it will no doubt have on future scholarship. Although small in scope, Edward's monograph serves as a refreshing analysis of one section of the Reconstruction South. This book is a must read for students of Reconstruction history or women's history, or those interested in a refreshing new perspective on postbellum North Carolina.

Rating:
Summary: failure of narrative
Review: This book makes an important point about the gendered politics of the Reconstruction period, although it is really about one place, not "Reconstruction," as the title leads us to believe. It enlarges our sense of what "politics" actually means,which is a good thing. But the clotted, dissertation-level prose here nearly ruins the book for me. It is not that the book is too theoretical or abstract, though it is both those things--I can handle that. It is just dull and insipid, as though it were written without regard for the reader--any reader. Lots of historians have stopped writing this kind of thing, thankfully.