Product Description

Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism.

According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260629 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-23
• Released on: 1996-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 410 pages

Amazon.com Review
Historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore examines an unfamiliar world in this groundbreaking study, the world of middle-class, educated black women at a time that was one of the nadirs of black-white relations in America. With the Supreme Court's affirmation of legal segregation, Southern black men found themselves disfranchised and excluded from politics. Black women filled that vacuum, Gilmore argues, making a place for themselves as ambassadors to the white community, and as activists on behalf of blacks, and bequeathing to their descendants a heritage of resistance that culminated in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

From Library Journal
In this extensively documented history, Gilmore (history, Yale) examines the imposition of legally mandated segregation in North Carolina at the turn of the century. African Americans had achieved significant success in that state even after the end of Reconstruction, and Gilmore argues that the incentive for segregation emerged in response to that success and to the stirrings of independence of white women. Vilification of the black man as a sexual predator served the twin purposes of banishing potential economic and political rivals and restricting the ambition of white women. This focus, however, provided an opportunity for black women to play the role of "diplomat" to the white community and to initiate a small measure of interracial cooperation. Although well written, this densely detailed exposition will attract a chiefly academic audience.?Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A densely packed study of politics and a circumscribed social group--middle-class black women--that reopens an entire segment of post-Reconstruction American history. Using her native North Carolina as a geographical focus, Gilmore (History/Yale Univ.), first illustrates the tenuous postCivil War openness that fostered a black middle class, details the institution of a policy of white supremacy that by 1900 resulted in the demonization and disenfranchisement of black men, and chronicles black women's efforts to effect political change outside the system. To remain involved in politics, black women turned to many kinds of public activity not connected to the all- white political parties--promoting education, sponsoring civic improvement projects, organizing temperance unions. Gilmore ends her study with the granting of suffrage to women in 1920, which, while not ending white supremacy, at least diminished one of its ``vulgar mechanisms.'' Gilmore's varied examples provide a powerful portrait of the depth and scope of black political activity during this difficult period, as well as the relentlessness of the white supremacy movement, and offer further insight into the origins of the modern civil rights movement. Memorable passages include Gilmore's description of the long struggle of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, an influential figure in North Carolina, to build bridges between black and white America; her analysis of how the Republican Party recast itself to exclude blacks; and her study of the impact on racial issues of North Carolinian Thomas Dixon's two racist novels: The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), the source of the movie sensation Birth of a Nation. Gilmore presents her research with clarity and vigor. Not a polemic, the book convinces because of its rigorous scholarship. While the names of many of the women chronicled here may fade, their often heroic efforts to fight racism will remain. Gilmore's book permanently revises the accepted history of the Jim Crow period. (11 illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

An innovative look at post-Reconstruction race relations
As Gilmore writes (p. 1) in Gender and Jim Crow, "since historians enter a story at its end, they sometimes forget that what is past to them was future to their subjects." And with regard to black optimism, potential and opportunities during Reconstruction, African American "subjects" looked forward to a future of encouraging possibilities, as African American males had real political power and influence within the Republican and populist parties, which courted their votes. These men and women believed that race as a social classification would decline in importance in favor of class. Yet just as the hopes of Agrarian radicals were thwarted by the harsh the realities of the two-party system, so too were the dreams of Reconstruction-era blacks crushed by the resurgence of white supremacy and the systematic attempts by whites to disenfranchise the Negro. Gilmore presents this tale of high hopes and shattered dreams in her first chapter, "Place and Possibility."
Gilmore's story is one of perseverance among the increasingly subjugated blacks of North Carolina after Reconstruction ended, in particular, the struggle of middle class black women to maintain power, dignity and to some degree control over their lives and communities. By the 1890s, the ugly image of white supremacy showed its face, as white men fought a successful battle to disenfranchise black men through the instrument of fear, that is to say, fear for the safety of white women from the ravenous clutches of Negro rapists. As Gilmore details, this sexually based contrivance branded black men as beasts and drove them from the political realm. Articulate black women, she argues, stepped in to this cultural and political vacuum to coordinate with whites (especially white women and Northern reformers) to get social services and to work for "racial uplift," especially through church and voluntary associations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Gilmore notes that these types of activities were not as exposed to white restrictions or ire as overt political action, and thus helped to assure some success by these middle-class black females. It seems that black women could travel within certain community and political circles that were no longer open to their male counterparts.
Gender and Jim Crow is an innovative look at post-Reconstruction race relations, in that the chief actors in Gilmore's tale are women. It nicely dovetails with Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, in that we see similar examples of the creation of Jim Crow and the use of sexual fears to bolster notions of white supremacy as well as white political solidarity. While Kantrowitz shows that Ben Tillman was representative of many of white Southerners of his day, I am unconvinced that Gilmore's subjects are as representative. Her geographic realm is limited to one state of the Upper South, North Carolina; did black women carve out a similar role for themselves in the Deep South as well? Additionally, her cast of characters is quite small, and perhaps we are drawn to these women and their story because of its very exceptionalsim and not its typicality. Nevertheless, Gilmore's new and nuance perspective is groundbreaking and valuable in that we see the era of Jim Crow from a viewpoint previously unexplored.

Best of Genre
This book is a mind-blower. It reveals the history of white supremacy as an overt political campaign in the South in the early 20th century, and more importantly the roles that middle-class black women self-consciously assumed in this very dangerous cultural arena. Historins talks a lot about ideology and race and agency, but this is the most skillful and convincing account that I've read: by examining how people - men, women, poor, rich, black, white - understood and tried to shape their worlds, Gilmore recasts a significant portion of American history, and made me re-examine my assumptions about racism and gender and politics. I'm working towards my graduate degree in history, so I've had to read scores of books that cover similar ground - and this is the by far the best treatment that I've read. Also very important: Gilmore is an excellent writer - this text reads as smoothly and as compellingly as a novel. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Original, important, a tad romantic
Gilmore breaks new ground on many fronts that will interest social historians of race and political historians. She uncovers the myriad arenas in which black women and white women pursued "politics" outside the formal arenas of electoral institutions. She also reveals the surprising coalitions formed across racial lines and the mindset of an upper-South State on the eve of disenfranchisement. Gilmore's writing flows smoothly, as other reviewers have noted, but at times becomes overwrought and sentimentalized in a way that makes it sometimes tedious and sometimes aggravating to stay with the text. She's become captured a bit by her characters and sources. But this is a small criticism in the context of an overwise pathbreaking study that's well worth the read.