The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900

The southern women's reform movement emerged gradually in the late nineteenth century, several decades behind the northern feminist movement. Jean Friedman explains this delay by examining the subtle and complex roots of women's identity to disclose the structures that defined -- and limited -- female autonomy in the South. She concludes that the church and family, more than the institution of slavery, inhibited the formation of an antebellum feminist movement.