A riveting read. Allured captures beautifully the energy and passion of Louisianans' work toward justice for womenblack, white, straight, lesbian, religious, secular. She complicates the stereotypical notion of the Deep South and its storied prejudices with the words of the people whose efforts yielded great benefits for women throughout the Pelican State. Anyone assuming that the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment equaled a failure of feminism in the South will have her mind changed by Allured's painstaking research and graceful writing. -- Rebecca Sharpless * author of Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 18651960 * This is a remarkable booka great history of our country but also many great individual stories of one place, here the Deep South. Janet Allured presents vivid accounts and thoughtful interpretations of the work of a cadre of African American, Hispanic, and white women who changed the social and economic landscape of their lives and the lives of others. In turn, the book itself becomes an essential reading in collective biography, the history of the twentieth-century South, and feminism. -- Susan Tucker * author of Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South * Deeply researched and masterfully written, Allureds book provides a compelling argument; feminism had deep roots in southern labor, religious, and civil rights/social justice traditions. Drawing extensively on oral histories and archival sources, and exploring key feminist issues such as ERA, divorce and equity issues, abortion access, and violence against women, Allured proves that southern feminist activists were a diverse group of women claiming varied racial/ethnic and class identities, and sexual orientations who came together to fight for their rights in Louisiana. Allureds book is an important corrective to histories of feminism that ignore critical activism in the South and reveals that southern feminists were critical grass-roots activists for womens rights in the last half of the twentieth century. -- Megan Taylor Shockley * author of We, Too, Are Americans: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 194054 *