Reviewed by Peter Bardaglio

During the last three decades an impressive wave of sophisticated studies exploring the history of social welfare in
the United States has appeared. But little has been said about the South.

"Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930" is a welcome corrective to this neglect. Within this collection of ten essays by younger scholars, edited by Elna C. Green, several show how women, both black and white, played a critical role in developing a uniquely Southern social welfare system.

E. Susan Barber looks at the treatment of white Civil War orphans in Richmond, while Susan Hamburger assesses the care of Confederate widows, mothers, and daughters in that same city. Both suggest that the long-standing image of the southern lady on her pedestal has obscured the ways in which white southern women gained access to the public arena before they had the right to vote.

The Female Humane Association, which is the focus of Barber's investigation, established its orphan asylum for white girls in 1805. Affluent white women made up the backbone of the association. As Barber asserts, although motivated by humanitarian concerns, the members "were also staking their own claim to a portion of the public sphere and a voice in Richmond society that was often denied to elite and middle-class women by the gender prescriptions of the nineteenth century." (p. 124).

The explosion in the number of orphans and the financial reverses precipitated by the Civil War posed an unprecedented challenge for the group. But Barber concludes that organization was actually strengthened as a result. Members gained a new sense of dedication and purpose, and were compelled to improve their fund-raising strategies.

Hamburger's engaging narrative, "We Take Care of Our Womenfolk," profiles the remarkable activism of the Richmond women who founded the Home for Needy Confederate Women. Obtaining a charter from the Virginia General Assembly in 1898, these women, including LaSalle Corbell Pickett, the wife of General George E. Pickett, raised sufficient funds from public and private sources to open the home in 1900.

When a fire seriously damaged the building in 1916, Elizabeth Montague, who was married to a Virginia congressman, led a new round of lobbying efforts that eventually resulted in the relocation of the institution to the Lee Camp Soldiers' Home property owned by the Commonwealth. The home moved into its more expansive quarters in 1932.

Mazie Hough's analysis of the efforts to provide unwed mothers a home in Memphis during the 1870s and 1880s is especially intriguing. The Memphis asylum was established by the Women's Christian Association (WCA), founded in 1875. The WCA, says Hough, was radical for its time—adopting an approach that "minimized the importance of a woman's reputation" and "stressed women's responsibility to protect other women." (p. 110).

As Hough notes, that approach contradicted some of the key assumptions underlying the defense of lynching—among them the notions that a woman's reputation, once damaged, was ruined forever and that white men served as the natural protectors of white womanhood.

But, with the outburst of racial hysteria in the 1890s, the organization ended its experiment, endorsing both the importance of a woman's reputation and the reliance of women on men to protect them. The refuge, according to Hough, "became a place of punishment and a means to force young women to comply with the society norms." (p. 116).

Joan Marie Johnson compares the activities of black and white clubwomen in South Carolina. While white women in the early twentieth century bolstered segregation through "their emphasis on southern identity and their outreach programs for whites only," black clubwomen defied Jim Crow by developing their own social welfare agenda (p. 160).

The African American clubwomen, in particular, opened a home for delinquent girls, pursuing a strategy of racial uplift that stressed the need to adopt middle-class norms and values. As Johnson observes, "Black southern women who promoted respectability undermined white justification for oppression" (p. 176). Their work provided a powerful argument against the claims of Ben Tillman and other white political leaders regarding the supposed immorality of black females.

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Peter Bardaglio is professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland, and a 1999-2000 fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.