". . . an important and original piece of work that helps
fill the enormous gap that currently exists in Southern women's
history."—Victoria E. Bynum, Southwest Texas State University
Deeds, wills, divorce decrees, and other evidence of the public
lives of nineteenth-century women belie the long-held beliefs of
their public invisibility. Angela Boswell's Her Act and Deed
follows the threads of Southern women's lives as they weave through
the public records of one Texas county during the middle of the
nineteenth century. Her unique approach to exploring women's roles
in a South that spanned the frontier, antebellum, Civil War, and
Reconstruction eras illuminates the truths of the feminine world of
those periods, and her analysis of this set of complete public records
for those years challenges the theory of men's and women's separate
spheres of influence.
The world Boswell reconstructs allows readers a more egalitarian,
multicultural look at life: working class and poor women, both black
and white, join their more affluent sisters in the pages of the
Colorado County, Texas, courthouse records. Those same records reveal
that the men of that world—most of them planters or farmers, the
majority of them owning at least a few slaves—were a force for women
to reckon with, both in public and at home. The almost constant pre-
sence of men in the home and their need to uphold the dominant, slave-
holding hierarchy produced a patriarchy more pervasive than that
experienced by women in the urban North.
Accessible to scholars and general readers alike, Her Act and Deed
represents a welcome addition to the classroom, to the scholar's
library, and to Texas history collections.
_________________________________________________________
ANGELA BOSWELL is an associate professor of history at Henderson
State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. She received her doctorate
from Rice University and has written extensively on the history of
Southern women.
Number Three: Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by
Texas A&M University–Commerce
