Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country.

McCurry's article in The Journal of American History in 1992 announced the arrival of a historian whose fresh perspective promised to transform familiar landscapes.(1) Masters of Small Worlds brilliantly fulfills that promise. A complex, sophisticated study, it marks intellectual advances along a broad front, but its primary success lies in its articulation of "gendered political history" (ix). By demonstrating that power relationships in the household profoundly shaped public political culture in the antebellum South, McCurry redraws the boundaries of high politics to include women and gender.

Law and custom gave every property-holding southern white man - middling …