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Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women's Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff, with a Foreward by Elizabeth Fox-- Genovese. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. xviii, 233 pp. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.
FROM THE VIRGIN MARY TO MEDEA, depictions of the mother in Western culture have long resonated with conflicting and deeply felt emotions. Traditionally, most representations of motherhood-often romanticized, sometimes demonized-were created by men. Recently, however, the feminist movement has propelled large numbers of women to voice their own experiences as mothers and daughters, leading to portrayals of women who are neither angels nor demons, but humans struggling with complicated lives and emotions. Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff's Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women's Writing contributes to this growing body of feminist scholarship work on motherhood by focusing on a sometimes neglected perspective-that of Southerners.
As Warren and Wolff explain in their introduction, their focus on the Southern experiences of mothers is necessary because the close interrelationship between regional and maternal identity in the South. The belle, the Southern lady, and the mammy, for example, are stereotypes permeating Southern culture that have little power in other regions of the country. Also peculiar to the South is the "race-sex-sin spiral" described by Lillian Smith-the sometimes explosive combination of fundamentalist religion, idealization of white women and racism against African Americans....