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Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 384 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8078-2287-6. $17.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8078-4596-5.
The Body Politic has breasts, and they are black. Gilmore's well-crafted Gender and ]im Crow accomplishes what is best about social history: It gives a voice to a marginalized social group that traditional historiography has ignored, African American women. Gilmore puts black women at the center of white supremacy politics in turn-of-the-century North Carolina to provide readers with a fresh conceptualization of the events that unfolded there. She chronicles African Americans' brush with upward social mobility during Reconstruction and Fusionists' rule, the construction of the fiction of white women's vulnerability to black men by race-baiting Democrats, the successful campaign to disfranchise poor white and black men, and the sometimes contradictory ideals of the Progressive Era.
Gilmore doesn't assume that women needed the vote to exercise political influence. Instead, we learn how black and white middleclass women organized themselves decades before suffrage to become power brokers and grassroots activists. By...