jensteerswell's review against another edition
3.0
Definitely not a fun summer beach read kind of book.
sinceremercy's review against another edition
4.0
Sort of a dual biography of Ida B. Wells and first female senator Rebecca Latimer Felton— but perhaps even more so the "biography" of the women's club movement and the beginnings of women's politics in the United States. Feimster handles the complicated material sensitively, particularly Felton's complicated and sometimes-contradictory politics— always a white supremacist and yet vacillating between criticising white men and wishing to extend protection to poor white and black women, and throwing her lot in with white men to increase the political power of white women.
It sheds a lot of light on the racial and sexual politics of Reconstruction through the early 20th century in the American south. I'd very much like to follow up on and learn more about the female lynching victims, white and black, and the pervasive climate of violence against women at this time (perpetrated mostly by white men). It provides some in sight, as well, into the ways white women operated in a world which simultaneously did them incredible violence and strictly controlled their behavior, and yet also offered them more power than they'd ever had before.
The subject matter is heavy and sometimes disturbing, but the book itself is deftly written and not at all the depressing slog I worried it might be at first.
It sheds a lot of light on the racial and sexual politics of Reconstruction through the early 20th century in the American south. I'd very much like to follow up on and learn more about the female lynching victims, white and black, and the pervasive climate of violence against women at this time (perpetrated mostly by white men). It provides some in sight, as well, into the ways white women operated in a world which simultaneously did them incredible violence and strictly controlled their behavior, and yet also offered them more power than they'd ever had before.
The subject matter is heavy and sometimes disturbing, but the book itself is deftly written and not at all the depressing slog I worried it might be at first.
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