Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women

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.'' (Mar.)