Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920.

Gilmore's fine book demonstrates the recent tendency among historians of women to write about gender as a principle of social organization, and therefore to embrace the history of men. Centered on middle-class African-American women in North Carolina, her book provides an important new interpretation of Progressive reform.

Gilmore draws a convincing picture of the rise of prosperous middle-class black communities in North Carolina after the Civil War. Sharing Woodward's view that Jim Crow laws and practices were new to the upper South in the 1890s, she emphasizes the "cataclysmic ruptures" that these laws introduced into "the fabric of black civil rights" (8).(1) In 1898, …