Annotation ContentsIntroduction. The Past as Prologue: Perspectives on Southern Women by Joe P. DunnSpheres of Economic Activity among Southern Women in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to the Future by Jacqueline JonesStealth in the Political Arsenal of Southern Women: A Retrospective for the Millennium by Sarah Wilkerson-FreemanWorking in the Shadows: Southern Women and Civil Rights by Barbara A. Woods"Separate but Equal" Case Law and the Higher Education of Women in the Twenty-first Century South by Amy Thompson McCandlessThe Changing Character of Farm Life: Rural Southern Women by Melissa WalkerOther Southern Women and the Voices of the Fathers: On Twentieth-Century Writing by Women in the U.S. South by Anne Goodwyn JonesSouthern Women and Religion by Nancy HardestyConclusion by Carol Bleser
Building upon the work of late twentieth-century scholars in the field of feminist studies, Megan Taylor Shockley provides an in-depth look at feminism in the modern U.S. South. Shockley challenges the monolithic view of the region as a conservative bastion and argues that feminist advocates have provided crucial social progressive force, particularly in Virginia, between 1970 and 2010. An innovative study, Creating a Progressive Commonwealth illustrates how feminists in the state challenged the traditional patriarchal system and engaged directly with the legislature through grassroots educational efforts on three major initiatives: passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, protection of abortion rights, and pursuit of legal and social rights for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Shockley suggests that advocates for gender equality fundamentally changed Virginia, improving the state’s support for women both personally and professionally as well as fostering an environment more conducive to additional progressive reform. In sharing the stories of these activists, the author discusses their initial choices to participate in the movement, the challenges they faced in promoting a progressive agenda, as well as their successes and failures. Throughout, Shockley emphasizes the need for scholars to look beyond the history of state legislatures in order to fully understand the nature of southern progressivism and feminism. Using both archival sources and oral histories, Creating a Progressive Commonwealth examines the individual women and their motivations as they battled recalcitrant legislators and conservative citizens to achieve social reforms.
Legendary Southern Baptist missionary Charlotte "Lottie" Moon played a pivotal role in revolutionizing southern civil society. Her involvement in the establishment of the Women's Missionary Union provided white Baptist women with an alternate means of gaining and asserting power within the denomination's organizational structure and changed it forever. In Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend Regina Sullivan provides the first comprehensive portrait of "Lottie," who not only empowered women but also inspired the formation of one of the most influential religious organizations in the United States. Despite being the daughter of slaveholders in antebellum Virginia, Moon never lived the life of a typical southern belle. Highly educated and influenced by models of independent womanhood, including an older sister who was a woman's rights advocate, an open opponent of slavery, and the first Virginian female to earn a medical degree, Moon followed her sister's lead and utilized her extensive education to successfully combine the language of woman's rights with the egalitarian impulse of evangelical Protestantism. In 1873 Moon found her true calling, however, in missionary work in China. During her tenure there she recommended that the week before Christmas be designated as a time of giving to foreign missions. In response to her vision, thousands of Southern Baptist women organized local missionary societies to collect funds, and in 1888, the Woman's Missionary Union was founded as the Southern Baptist Convention's female auxiliary for missionary work. Sullivan credits Moon's role in the establishment of the Woman's Missionary Union as having a significant impact on the erosion of patriarchal power and women's new engagement with the public sphere. Since her initial plea in 1888, the Missionary Union's annual "Lottie Moon Christmas Offering" has raised over a billion dollars to support missionary work. Lottie Moon captures the influence and culminating effect of one woman's personal, spiritual, and civic calling.
Scholars of second-wave feminism often center their research on northern thought and political activity and usually overlook the vibrant pockets of activism that existed elsewhere. In Remapping Second-Wave Feminism, Janet Allured attempts to reshape the national narrative by focusing on the grassroots women’s movement in the South, particularly in Louisiana. This book delves into unexplored origins of the feminist movement. While acknowledging the ways that the fight for African American civil rights produced the women’s liberation movement in the South—and subsequently in the North—Allured also locates other wellsprings of the movement that were particularly important to southern change-seekers, especially preexisting women’s organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the YWCA. Also, for many southern feminists, being part of a faith tradition that emphasized social justice reform is what ultimately propelled them into working for gender equality. Allured highlights key figures in Louisiana; divisions based on regional, sexual, and ideological differences; access to abortion; lawsuits that had national implications that emanated from southern women; and the fight against sexual assault and domestic violence. Through detailed archival and oral history research, she has forged a new path, making this a foundational work for the field. Remapping Second-Wave Feminism will amend how we reflexively view feminism as a northern phenomenon, giving proper due to the southern contribution.
Growing up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, Claire Myers Owens sought adventure and freedom at an early age. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York’s Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its “risqué” content. Drawn to ideals of selfactualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, and became an ardent follower of Carl Jung. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, moving to Rochester, NY, where she joined the Zen Center and studied under Roshi Philip Kapleau. She published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three. Friedman’s rediscovery of Owens brings well-deserved attention to her little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Friedman chronicles Owens’s robust intellect and her tumultuous private life and, along the way, shows readers what makes her story significant. With very few role models in the early twentieth century, Owens blazed her own path of independence and enlightenment.
When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height's careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri's work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.
In Emancipation's Daughters, Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One: The Hour Has Come -- Two: Now Comes the Test -- Three: Making Way for Democracy -- Four: On the Firing Line -- Five: The South Will Be Invaded -- Six: New Negro Southerners -- Seven: Stormy Weather -- Epilogue: In the Whirlwind -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y
Separately they were formidable—together they were unstoppable. Despite their intriguing lives and the deep impact they had on their community and region, the story of Richard Joshua Reynolds (1850–1918) and Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880–1924) has never been fully told. Now Michele Gillespie provides a sweeping account of how R. J. and Katharine succeeded in realizing their American dreams. From relatively modest beginnings, R. J. launched the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which would eventually develop two hugely profitable products, Prince Albert pipe tobacco and Camel cigarettes. His marriage in 1905 to Katharine Smith, a dynamic woman thirty years his junior, marked the beginning of a unique partnership that went well beyond the family. As a couple, the Reynoldses conducted a far-ranging social life and, under Katharine's direction, built Reynolda House, a breathtaking estate and model farm. Providing leadership to a series of progressive reform movements and business innovations, they helped drive one of the South's best examples of rapid urbanization and changing race relations in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Together they became one of the New South's most influential elite couples. Upon R. J.'s death, Katharine reinvented herself, marrying a World War I veteran many years her junior and engaging in a significant new set of philanthropic pursuits. Katharine and R. J. Reynolds reveals the broad economic, social, cultural, and political changes that were the backdrop to the Reynoldses' lives. Portraying a New South shaped by tensions between rural poverty and industrial transformation, white working-class inferiority and deeply entrenched racism, and the solidification of a one-party political system, Gillespie offers a masterful life-and-times biography of these important North Carolinians.
From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation. In this illuminating volume, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs examine rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a better understanding of not only how women learned to read, write, and speak in American colleges but also how they used their education in their lives beyond college. With a collective enrollment and impact rivaling that of the Seven Sisters, the schools examined in this study—Mississippi State College for Women (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), North Carolina College for Women (1891), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), Alabama College for Women (1896), Texas State College for Women (1901), Florida State College for Women (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908)—served as important centers of women’s education in their states, together educating over a hundred thousand students before World War II and contributing to an emerging professional class of women in the South. After tracing the establishment and evolution of these institutions, Gold and Hobbs explore education in speech arts and public speaking at the colleges and discuss writing instruction, setting faculty and departmental goals and methods against larger institutional, professional, and cultural contexts. In addition to covering the various ways the public women’s colleges prepared women to succeed in available occupations, the authors also consider how women’s education in rhetoric and writing affected their career choices, the role of race at these schools, and the legacy of public women’s colleges in relation to the history of women’s education and contemporary challenges in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. The experiences of students and educators at these institutions speak to important conversations among scholars in rhetoric, education, women’s studies, and history. By examining these previously unexplored but important institutional sites, Educating the New Southern Woman provides a richer and more complex history of women’s rhetorical education and experiences.
