Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement by Debra L. Schultz Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement by Constance Curry, Joan C.Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Penny Patch, Theresa Del Pozzo, Sue Thrasher, ElaineDeLott Baker, Emmie Schrader Adams, and Casey HaydenGoing South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement by Debra L.  Schultz; Deep in OurHearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement by Constance  Curry; Joan C. Browning; Dorothy Dawson  Burlage; Penny  Patch; Theresa  Del Pozzo; Sue  Thrasher;Elaine DeLott  Baker; Emmie Schrader  Adams; Casey  HaydenReview by: Wini BreinesSigns, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 1670-000Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/423343 .

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1670 ❙ Book Reviews

zenship as Frederick Douglass and so many others rightly understood it—we are not done with this subject, and our enduring commitment tomarriage (and the conventional gender relations it appears to require) willcontinue to exact a price from women. John Adams’s thinking aboutwomen’s citizenship is not yet simply the stuff of history. The idea of thecitizen wife remains something of an oxymoron. ❙

Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. By Debra L.Schultz. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. ByConstance Curry, Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, PennyPatch, Theresa Del Pozzo, Sue Thrasher, Elaine DeLott Baker, EmmieSchrader Adams, and Casey Hayden. Athens: University of Georgia Press,2000.

Wini Breines, Northeastern University

B oth of these books about white women activists contribute to a grow-ing literature on women’s roles in the southern civil rights movement.Public attention has been paid to male leaders, but slowly a picture

is developing of the critical position of women whose names, for the mostpart, are not well known. Going South is based on oral histories of fifteenwhite Jewish women born, with one exception, between 1935 and 1943.Deep in Our Hearts consists of memoirs by nine white women who weredeeply involved in the civil rights movement. Only one of the nine mem-oirs is by a Jewish woman. Almost all of the nine women fall within thesame age range, which is interesting because we often think of white sixtiesactivists as baby boomers, born in the late 1940s and 1950s. The GoingSouth informants were generally less involved, meaning that most, but notall, came to the movement later or stayed a shorter time period than thememoirists.

Twenty-five years ago Sara Evans wrote Personal Politics: The Roots ofWomen’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, animportant book that attained classic status, albeit not without criticism.1

1 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Move-ment and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).

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S I G N S Winter 2005 ❙ 1671

In chapter 2, titled “Southern White Women in a Southern Black Move-ment,” Evans characterizes many of the veteran white female volunteersas southern and Christian, linking their egalitarian idealism to southernProtestantism: “Most white women who participated in the early years ofthe civil rights movement tended to be southerners, and virtually withoutexception white southern women who joined the civil rights movementcame to it first through the Church” (35). Like white first-wave feminismnourished in abolitionism, post–World War II feminism traces its roots tothe civil rights movement. Women like Casey Hayden, Dorothy Dawson,Cathy Cade, Sue Thrasher, and Connie Curry (whose family moved agreat deal but settled in Greensboro, North Carolina) learned, notthrough their families or communities but through progressive Protestantchurches and YMCAs, mainly on southern campuses, to embrace inte-gration and equality and to become activists.

I remember first reading Evans’s 1979 book and being amazed thatwhite southern women were significant members of the early civil rightsmovement.2 I was raised in a northern white Jewish liberal family, andthe whites I knew who volunteered for the freedom movement (oftenlater than some of the white pioneers), either for the Freedom Rides or,especially, for Freedom Summer in 1964, were Jews, and I assumed mostwhite volunteers were as well. Schultz writes about northern women con-nected to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), aswere the Deep in Our Hearts writers, whose Jewishness propelled themtoward antiracist activism. Her primary focus is how the secular cultureof Judaism, usually learned in their families, instilled in young women amoral and liberal perspective that embraced equality and freedom for alland that often translated into activist political goals. Schultz reports onthe class, immigrant, and “border” experiences of second- and third-gen-eration Jewish girls whose parents struggled and assimilated. Often, dueto the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and communist or liberal family politicsin the politically paranoid and profoundly conservative 1950s, the girlsdid not fit into American categories, including those of race. They didnot see themselves as exactly white; sometimes blacks did not either. Forexample, civil rights activist Bernice Reagon, who knew white people fromthe South, said, “When I went to New York, the white people were notthe same white people. . . . Because I grew up in Albany, Georgia, andI knew what white people looked like, and they looked like none of them

2 See Wini Breines, “Review Essay: Sara Evans’s Personal Politics,” Feminist Studies 5,no. 3 (1979): 496–506.

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1672 ❙ Book Reviews

dark-skinned white folks I saw up in New York.”3 And in 1963 in Meridian,Mississippi, Miriam Cohen Glickman discovered that “the local Black com-munity assumed I was Black because there was no concept that a whitegirl would be down there” (Schultz 107). Schultz cites a 1973 study ofsouthern Jewry that suggests many blacks did not look at Jews as whites(107). Locating these Jewish women’s experiences in the history of Jewishoppression, Schultz sees their participation in the civil rights movementas a chapter in a secular Jewish dedication to ending tyranny and in apassion for social justice. The women articulate a gender consciousnessas well, often having grown up in the postwar time of the feminist mystiqueor in sexist homes where fathers and brothers were preferred. Going southshattered both racial and gender boundaries.

Because Deep in Our Hearts consists of in-depth, first-person accounts,the reader gets a fuller sense of what it meant for white women to becomepart of the civil rights movement. The first thing to say about the youngwomen—in both books—is that they were brave. Much has been writtenabout the terror and violence of southern apartheid for African Americans.Black people had lived with it for centuries. White organizers and vol-unteers experienced a chastening taste of it, although southerners weremore familiar with it than were northerners. The southern women hadgrown up in a rigidly segregated society and better understood its rules.Some of their families rejected them when they became activists in thecivil rights movement. Unlike many of the Jewish activists, they were cutoff by kin as they embraced radical racial politics. All of the southernersdefied their culture by allying themselves with black people and joiningSNCC. They committed themselves to transforming the United States,and in the process their lives were transformed. Some of the northerners,too, broke with their cultures and families. Emmie Schrader Adams, ofSt. Paul, Minnesota, for example, tells of her father turning her lettersover to the FBI. The women were all pioneers as they moved out of theirprescribed white and feminine niches to join the movement.

The accounts in Deep in Our Hearts remind us that the civil rightsmovement, even for those in SNCC, was black-led and based in the blackcommunity, that the white women participants were cognizant of theterrorism of southern racism and careful to follow African-American lead-ership and instincts about how to proceed. It was a dangerous time; theyrisked a great deal. Lives were damaged and lost. The authors in Deep in

3 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: ABlack Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of ColorPress, 1983), 356–68.

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S I G N S Winter 2005 ❙ 1673

Our Hearts are respectful and loving toward the movement, some havingfound an interracial home there that they did not want to give up; racestill defines their lives. They were all changed by taking part in a movementdedicated to racial integration and freedom, and most have dedicated theirlives to social change.4 In contrast to the Jewish women featured inSchultz’s book, most do not talk about family or cultural heritage as abasis for their activism. That heritage appears less visible in their accounts,which does not mean that it is less important for them than for Jewishwomen. Almost all of the women in these books self-report or are de-scribed as being tenaciously loyal to SNCC and are careful to downplayinterracial tensions. They recall and remain committed to the importanceand positive aspects of the civil rights movement; this has been the dom-inant approach taken by those who were young people then. Memoirs byblack female SNCC activists are long overdue, and the evidence suggeststhat they, too, circle the wagons. This is particularly relevant for genderissues. The loyalty of most female SNCC activists is notable in contrastto that of white women in the new left and antiwar movements, whoserupture with the mixed movements was dramatic. Racism linked blackwomen and men and their white allies in their need to maintain a unitedfront. Their profound experiences created a devotion to the civil rightsmovement that altered so much in their lives and in the United States.

In 2005 it is difficult to imagine that religion functioned in such ademocratic political manner, encouraging so many young people, whiteand black, to become active in social change for racial justice. The womenin these books were inspired by the civil rights movement and by thesecular and religious culture and institutions of Judeo-Christian religion.Cynicism and despair were absent from their worldviews, in part due topostwar optimism and prosperity. Their families disapproved or supportedthem, and in the case of the Jewish women it was usually the latter, butthey all plunged into daring lives. They were women who had more ontheir minds than marriage, motherhood, and security, and their civil rightswork was both an example and a source of change for American women.I look forward to more books and memoirs, particularly by African-Amer-ican SNCC activists. I hope these excellent books are part of a resurgencein women participants’ writing about the movements of the 1960s. It’stime. ❙

4 See Becky Thompson’s A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) for whites who were inspired by the civilrights movement, among other movements, to devote themselves to antiracist politics.

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