Choice Review

Cox (Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte) highlights the central role the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) played in creating and sustaining the myth of the lost cause in early-20th-century southern culture. She argues that through the building of Confederate monuments, opening of Confederate museums, and rewriting of Civil War history for southern schools, the UDC promoted an image of Confederate men and women as heroic, self-sacrificing, patriotic Americans. While these women encouraged rising generations to revere the southern past, their crusade also served to legitimate the racial, gender, and class hierarchies of their time. Cox's study adds an important gender dimension to current scholarship about southerners' attitudes toward the New South, suggesting that elite women were much more antagonistic toward economic and cultural development than were their husbands and brothers. However, the book presents the UDC almost exclusively as a force that drove cultural developments in the Jim Crow South rather than as merely one manifestation of cultural trends of the period. The gender analysis here could also be more extensive, and other works paint a more in-depth picture of the New South in general. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. N. Roth Widener University