Reviews
" By focusing on women and the remarkable influence of the UDC, Karen Cox has filled in an important part of the story of the Lost Cause and its impact on southern society in the early twentieth century and beyond."
--Civil War Book Review
" Valuable for anyone interested in Southern history, civil rights, or how Confederate culture was transmitted across generations."
--East Texas Historical Association
"An important step on the way to understanding the South's Daughters of the Confederacy more completely."
--North Carolina Historical Review
"Dixie's Daughters provides a much-needed institutional history of the UDC at the height of its influence; that alone would be a major contribution. But Cox incorporates into it an exploration of the impact of the group on southern culture and the lives of the upper-class women who participated in it."
--Southern Cultures
"Dixie's Daughters looks at the group's roots in memorial association, its meteoric rise to power in the early 1900s, its monument-building and benevolent activities, and its tireless efforts to promulgate pro-Confederate historical revisionism and educational indoctrination."
--Atlanta History
"Dixie's Daughters adds a new dimension to the growing scholarship on the creation of historical memory. Cox treats her subjects as vital, influential, political actors and integrates them into the Progressive Era by suggesting that southern women displayed their own, unique brand of activism. This is a book that would serve well in the classroom in courses on women's history, southern history, and the Progressive Era."
--H-SAWH
"Cox's book is an important contribution to our understanding of the creation of the Lost Cause culture which became so dominant in the New South, and it is highly recommended reading for all Southern historians as well as historians of American women's history."
--Louisiana History
"The first full-length history of the Daughters of the Confederacy, this book offers something new to the history of the South and to the history of memory generally."
"This is an important work and contributes well to the ongoing efforts to make sense of the influence of the past on the present, or more specifically, on the ways Americans have used the past to make the present conform to their desires." Lyde Cullen Sizer, Sarah Lawrence College
--The Alabama Review
"A valuable contribution to the historiography of the Lost Cause."
--Journal of Southern History
"Dixie's Daughters stands as a comprehensive and important survey of an organization that has had great bearing on the way people have remembered the Confederate experience in the twentieth century, and certainly stands as the authoritative work on the subject."
--Florida Historical Quarterly
"At long last, the UDC, founded in 1894, has received a full scholarly treatment. Cox's superb research encompasses the minutes and papers of UDC leaders and some effective interviews conducted in 1989-1990 with women who had been members of the Children of the Confederacy."
"Cox's reader does not lack information for imagining how sinister the UDC's influence may have been over time. But as one tries to estimate a tally sheet of the money and energy spent by the UDC and its allies on monuments, on racist history books, on glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, and on the perpetuation of a tragically misshapen story of the meaning of the Civil War, we might gasp in critical indignation at the sheer weight of the damage done by these dedicated women to American race relations and to the nation's historical imagination."
--The Journal of American History
In this first full length book on the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Cox traces how a group of southern women, without even the right to vote, came to have enormous social and political influence through preserving Confederate culture.
--Daily Siftings Herald