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In Shrill Hurrahs, Kate Côté Gillin presents a new perspective on gender roles and racial violence in South Carolina during Reconstruction and the decades after the 1876 election of Wade Hampton as governor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, southerners struggled to either adapt or resist changes to their way of life. Gillin accurately perceives racial violence as an attempt by white southern men to reassert their masculinity, weakened by the war and emancipation, and as an attempt by white southern women to preserve their antebellum privileges. As she reevaluates relationships between genders, Gillin also explores relations within the female gender. She has demonstrated that white women often exacerbated racial and gender violence alongside men, even when other white women were victims of that violence. Through the nineteenth century, few bridges of sisterhood were built between black and white women. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent free women in the postwar years, while white women often opposed these assertions of black female autonomy. Ironically even black women participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an attempt to safeguard their rights. In the turmoil of an era that extinguished slavery and redefined black citizenship, race, not gender, often determined the relationships that black and white women displayed in the defeated South. By canvassing and documenting numerous incidents of racial violence, from lynching of black men to assaults on white women, Gillin proposes a new view of postwar South Carolina. Tensions grew over controversies including the struggle for land and labor, black politicization, the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, the election of 1876, and the rise of lynching. Gillin addresses these issues and more as she focusses on black women's asserted independence and white women's role in racial violence. Despite the white women's reactionary activism, the powerful presence of black women and their bravery in the face of white violence reshaped southern gender roles forever.

In the years following the Civil War, southerners struggled to adapt to the changes wrought by the war. Many, however, worked to resist those changes. In particular, southern men fought the revised racial and gender roles that resulted from defeat and emancipation. Southern men felt emasculated by both events and sought to consolidate the control they had enjoyed before the war. In their efforts to restore their pre-war hegemony, these men used coercion and violence with regularity. White southern women were often as adamant as their male counterparts. Women of the elite classes were most eager to bolster antebellum ideals of womanhood, the privileges of which they enjoyed and guarded carefully. In keeping with the turmoil of the war, however, white women endorsed, encouraged, and engaged in acts of racial violence alongside their men. Such behavior may have been intended to preserve the antebellum order, but it served only to alter it. In addition, black women were as determined to carve out a measure of womanhood for themselves as powerfully as white women worked to keep it from them. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent free women in the post-war years. Ironically, they too participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an effort to safeguard their rights. Such activities did not simply force the inclusion of black women in white definitions of womanhood, but altered the meaning of womanhood for both races. The fields of battle on which these men and women engaged included the struggle for land and labor immediately following the war's end; the rise of black politicization and the reaction of white Democrats; the creation of the Ku Klux Klan as an agent of both gender and politics; the election of 1876 in which men and women of both races used the political contest to assert their competing gender definitions; and the rise of lynching as the final, desperate act of antebellum white manhood. Despite the reactionary nature of white women's activism, the fact of their activism and the powerful presence of black women in these violent exchanges reshaped the nature of southern gender roles forever.