Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective

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s outher ome at the Millennium A Historical Perspective

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Edited by Melissa Walker, Jeanette R. Dunn, and Joe P. Dunn

       

Copyright ©  by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri  Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved           Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Southern women at the millennium : a historical perspective / edited by Melissa Walker, Jeanette R. Dunn, and Joe P. Dunn. p. cm. Papers presented at a symposium held Mar. –,  at Converse College. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---X (alk. paper) . Women—Southern States—Congresses. . Women—Southern States—History—th century—Congresses. I. Walker, Melissa, – II. Dunn, Jeanette R. III. Dunn, Joe P., – HQ.S S  .'—dc  ™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ., .

Designer:   Typesetter:  , . Printer and Binder:  -    Typefaces:  

Dedicated to Joe Ann Lever In grateful appreciation for her boundless support for the education of young women

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Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix The Past as Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      oe . unn

Spheres of Economic Activity among Southern Women in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .       acqueline ones

Stealth in the Political Arsenal of Southern Women . . . . . . . . . . 

     arah ilkerson-reeman

Working in the Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

     arbara . oods

“Separate but Equal” Case Law and the Higher Education of Women in the Twenty-First-Century South. . . . . . . . . . . . . .  my hompson c andless

The Changing Character of Farm Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     elissa alker

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Other Southern Women and the Voices of the Fathers. . . . . . .   -      ..  nne oodwyn ones

Southern Women and Religion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  ancy . ardesty

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  arol . leser

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

s Preface To celebrate the new millennium, Converse College determined that an academic symposium was the most appropriate activity. The topic selected was a natural fit. Dedicated to the education of women, primarily southern women, for more than  years, Converse officials believed that the changing roles for southern women over the past century and projections concerning their future in the next century were unquestionably the subjects to address. The academic symposium, “Southern Women in the Twenty-first Century: A Historical Perspective for a New Millennium,” took place on campus on March –, . Eight distinguished women scholars offered original presentations on southern women in the economic, political, civil rights, educational, agricultural, literary, and religious spheres. During the stimulating two days, Converse faculty and staff, students, faculty and students from other area colleges, and guests from the local community engaged in a dialogue and discussions about these important issues. The symposium was modeled on a previous successful event convened to commemorate Converse College’s centennial in . The academic conference at that time, which also projected into the South’s future, resulted in a book, The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Joe. P. Dunn and Howard L. Preston, published by the University of Illinois Press in . The book has been used in courses at various colleges, and we hope that this new volume will earn the same consideration. The driving force for both conferences was Joe Ann Lever, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who retired after forty years at the college just as the manuscript of this volume went to the publisher. Her committed, passionate, and sustained devotion to preparing southern women for their futures merits the dedication of this volume to her. The editors acknowledge the generous financial assistance from the South Carolina Humanities Council, a state program of the National Endowment

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for the Humanities (NEH), as well as the Converse College Faculty Development Committee’s NEH Visiting Humanist Fund that helped to make the symposium and this volume possible. We also appreciate the commitment and support of this project of Nancy Oliver Gray, president of Converse College; Tom McDaniel, provost and vice president for academic affairs; and our faculty colleagues at Converse. Joe and Jenny Dunn thank their college-age son, Jarrett, for being as proud of his parents’ accomplishments as they are of his. Melissa Walker is grateful to Catherine Clinton, Carol Bleser, and Corrie Norman for their excellent advice on selecting panelists and on the editing process. She thanks her husband, Chuck Reback, for tolerating her distraction over the course of this project. We thank Converse student interns Nitu Bagchi, Rebecca Crandall, and Jane Marion for providing endless hours of research and administrative support for both the conference and the book.

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s The Past as Prologue    

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eminist commentator Trish Sommers proclaimed that “tomorrow is a women’s issue.” Unquestionably, the twenty-first century will witness dramatic advancements in women’s issues, rights, and status. This follows a century of unprecedented changes in the lives of women in America. The technological and communication revolution of the twentieth century impacted women in ways even more emphatic than it did men. No aspect of women’s existence—politically, socially, economically, culturally, intellectually—remained untouched in the past one hundred years. Our focus will be on the American South, the most traditional area of the country. Southern women may not always have been in the forefront of innovation, but their lives were transformed nevertheless. My mother’s life affords a glimpse of the change of the past century. Born in  at the nexus of the rural Midwest and South, she walked miles to school from the first grade through high school. Sometimes during inclement weather her father delivered her in a horse-drawn buggy. The family acquired a Model T Ford in , but it was used solely to drive to church, and only in good weather since it bogged down in the mud on what passed for roads. The so-called Roaring Twenties escaped my mother completely, and the Great Depression years were tough times but not that different from the previous hard decade in the agrarian community. She attended college from  to  and with her two-year teaching certificate taught in various rural elementary schools for the next nine years as she continued her college work in the summers. The New Deal had little impact upon her particular situation, but like everyone of her generation, World War II touched all families. In , she married my father, who was serving in the army, and she became 

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a mother during the first year of the postwar baby boom. Although she kept the financial books for my father’s business for twenty-five years, she was primarily a homemaker who devoted her life to raising two sons who were instilled with a set of values, the product of rural America and “the World’s Greatest Generation,” that expected us to fulfill our responsibilities to home, community, and nation. The century’s transportation revolution marked my mother’s life from the horse and buggy through the history of the automobile and the development of roads and highways, the passenger train, and the airplane. Her family was among the first in the community to embrace the major technological attributes of the century, including the telephone, electricity, radio, and television. I remember, when I was a young boy, the house crammed with people to watch the  presidential nominating conventions on the first television in the neighborhood. My mother tells about the same phenomenon with the radio in her childhood. From a world circumscribed as a girl by the local school and church within walking distance, my mother witnessed a man on the moon, the space shuttle, satellites, the computer revolution, and the Internet. As my mother and father built a business, raised a family, and served as pillars of community, church, and school, they reflected the middle-class values of their generation. My mother was born into an environment where everyone was much like her in experience, values, and beliefs. She lived almost her entire life in the same community, indeed most of her life in the house in which she was born. But she did not escape the global world, and she lived her later years in a vastly more complex mosaic of racial, cultural, and religious diversity than her parents could ever have envisioned for her. My mother was not a particularly political individual, but the major events of the century intruded upon her family’s life. Beyond the great conflict of her generation, war continued to intervene in her family’s life. A brother-inlaw died in the Korean War; one son served in Vietnam; the other had key leadership roles in the war in Bosnia, in the conflict against Al Qaeda, and the war in Iraq. My mother would never have speculated that her sons would live around the world at various times in their lives. And her grandchildren, products of that global, internationalized, suburban environment, push the parameters of her experiences even further. My mother’s mother, who lived through the mid-twentieth century, could not have conceived in her wildest imagination that her great-granddaughter, an air force officer, would manage global warfare from an aircraft circling the globe. But my mother in her latter years continues to make accommodations with the ever escalating technological and medical biotech world around her.

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In sum, my mother’s life reflects many of the dramatic changes of the past century. Although her life was unquestionably rural and in many respects quite reflective of southern culture, she actually lived a little more than twenty miles north of where the real South begins in Southeast Missouri, a geographical line as indistinct as it was culturally clear. As the included authors demonstrate, the South and southernness are not monolithic. Several Souths exist, but two characteristics tend to be identifying. Those two salient factors—the prominence of class and the prevailing emphasis of race— were minor factors in my mother’s life, indication enough that her identity was more midwestern than endemically southern. Not until she moved to South Carolina in the last years of her life was she struck by the predominance of these elements as basic components of culture. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the advent of a new millennium, we took the opportunity at the March  symposium described in the preface to assess the evolution of the past century, especially of recent decades, and we contemplated the state of the present and future prospects for southern women. Starting with the premise that knowledge of the past is essential for discernment about the present and the best preparation for envisioning the future, we gathered a distinguished group of female scholars to energize a dialogue. They fulfilled that task at the conference, and we trust that their contributions here do so as well. The essays follow no format; indeed, they are an eclectic lot. Each scholar independently provides a perspective on an aspect of the whole in her own way. The commentators do not necessarily speak to each other nor do they agree, their methodologies differ, and their disciplinary perspectives vary, but some common themes emerge. Class, race, economic inequity, the bonds of women across these divides, increasing urbanization and urban values, the impact of education and political involvement, and women’s leadership style and successes are evident themes in most contributions. I would not presume to offer any synthesis, but the following is a brief introduction to the content and arguments of the essays. The parameters of the world expanded for women during the century, but as Jacqueline Jones demonstrates in her theoretical framework about women’s economic well-being, the South also maintained great regressive continuities throughout the century. Particularly, she emphasizes “its persistent rurality and . . . the peculiar force with which racial ideologies have shaped class and gender relations.” Jones argues that virtually all women in the twentieth-century South worked even if the definition of what constituted “work” remained a highly contested issue. Women labored both within and beyond the household, whether in the fields or factory or in service capacities.

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Because it is difficult to make generalizations about so many different areas and chronological spans, she employs historical vignettes to focus upon the difficulties for poor and black women in specific time and place situations from the early century through the s. Even the advent of the relative Sunbelt prosperity of the late twentieth century did not change the fact that women did not share proportionally in the new economic reality. And many of the opportunities for women, as well as for men, in the professional realm went to immigrants from other parts of the country as the South experienced the largest in-migration of any geographical region of the nation. Jones’s predictions for the twenty-first century focus on continuities with the preceding century: the continuing disparity of opportunity between rural and urban women, education as the most significant factor in women’s economic well-being, the continuing dilemma of balancing paid labor outside the home with the unpaid labor within, the insecurity of women’s jobs, and the quality of life dependent upon a woman’s income. The latter issue, as with many of the others, seems to imply the absence of a male income within a family unit. The assumption is also evident that race will continue to be a significant factor in southern life, and the author’s proclivity for greater federal responsibility in the social-economic realm is clear. Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman echoes many of the same assumptions and themes as Jones. She chooses to tell the story of the growth of southern women’s political involvement primarily through the lens of the role that women, black and white, played in the transformation of the Democratic Party in the South from the party of segregation, white male privilege, and disfranchisement to the party that claims the mantle of inclusion and diversity. She argues that southern women and women’s groups have not received just attention for the role that they played in shaping both political parties today. She also asserts that any study of southern women’s activity must not separate the subject into white and black women’s causes because it is important “to see the parallel, cumulative, and sometimes tandem influence of southern black and white women on parties, public policies, legislation, and government.” Wilkerson-Freeman contends that the political agenda of southern female activists from the late nineteenth through the end of the twentieth centuries included four primary issues: education, public health and welfare, civil rights, and gender equity. As women battled for these reforms, they faced opposition from traditional white southern male leadership and by the latter twentieth century from the males’ conservative female allies. As she traces the above themes from the s through the present, she calls attention to a number of important southern activist women, both prominent and less

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known. Particularly featured is North Carolinian Gladys Avery Tillett, an avid Democratic organizer and strategist from the late s through the early s. Wilkerson-Freeman’s politics are clear as she tends to cast the future in political party dichotomies and gender warfare terms: southern Democratic women, black and white, dismantling structures of disfranchisement, undemocratic mechanisms that “artificially” enhance the power of “conservative” southern politicians against “well-armed, well-financed, angry white ‘conservative’ men” and their Republican female cohorts. Barbara A. Woods, like Wilkerson-Freeman, focuses on less well-known women, black and white, in the civil rights movement. She begins with a useful survey of the extant literature on black and white women in the movement, some well known and others less so, organized state by state, before providing profiles on six participants, three black and three white women. The three black women are all obscure beyond their state of South Carolina. Gloria Blackwell Rackley was a prime mover in the Orangeburg civil rights movement. Her accomplishments include integrating the local hospital, winning a lawsuit against the local school district that fired her for participating in civil rights activity, serving as an officer in the South Carolina NAACP, and leading protest marches at South Carolina State University. Beatrice Taylor McKnight played much the same role in Columbia. She worked in behalf of community improvement projects in poor black neighborhoods, helped obtain social and legal services to those in need, and participated in the voting rights and school integration movements in the state capital city. Victoria Way DeLee, a significant figure in the voter registration and public school integration battles in deeply segregated and repressive Dorchester County, is the best known of the women. While developing these profiles, Woods often invokes the activities of two of the most prominent black women activists in the state: Modjeska Monteith Simkins and Septima P. Clark. The three white women—Joan C. Browning from south Georgia, Texan Dorothy Dawson Burlage, and Sue Thrasher from Tennessee—were even more obscure until each was covered in Constance Curry and others’ Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (), the basic source from which Woods constructs these three profiles. Woods’s theme is that despite the many historical and cultural obstacles to sisterhood between white and black women, in fact these and other remarkable women did leave a legacy that can be built upon to continue the struggles for justice of the present and future. Amy Thompson McCandless also echoes the theme of the interrelationship of gender and race in the South, in this case crucial to understanding

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the history of higher education of women in the South. Debates over “separate but equal” in higher education dominated the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first century. The Civil Rights Act of  was primarily about prohibiting racial discrimination, but the inclusion of the word sex in the legislation provided new parameters for women. However, in this and in following legislation, generous exclusion provisions allowed continued gender segregation in many traditionally single-sex arenas. For many years, the courts focused on racial rather than gender issues. However, as gender equality emerged as a significant factor in public education at all levels in the late s and s, two of the first high-profile gender cases dealt with men suing to gain admission to state-supported women’s institutions. McCandless tells the interesting stories of the legal challenges by males at Mississippi University for Women and Texas Woman’s University. Under court pressure, both of these large, public single-sex institutions opened their doors to men. This left only two single-sex public institutions in the country. McCandless continues with the intricate sagas of the legal battle to open the Citadel in South Carolina and the Virginia Military Institute to women. Because two private women’s colleges were drawn into South Carolina’s and Virginia’s strategies to maintain public single-sex education, important questions emerged about single-sex institutions in the private realm as well. The whole range of public assistance to students at private colleges raised the potential that this debate could take on even larger dimensions. Beyond these quite interesting vignettes that highlight unresolved gender questions that will continue to be legal issues in the twenty-first century, McCandless addresses other gender trends in higher education for the next generation. Melissa Walker’s essay traces the profound transformation of the rural South in the twentieth century and its impact on women’s lives. During the century, hundreds of thousands of rural families moved from the rural countryside to urban areas, and those who remained on the land witnessed dramatic changes in their lives as well. Walker employs oral history to offer vignettes from women’s lives—white, black, Native American, and immigrant—at various times and in different areas of the region. During the first two decades, the “golden age of agriculture,” national farm income more than doubled with rural inhabitants gaining the financial resources to buy consumer products that improved their quality of lives. Because the South did not experience the boom to the extent of the rest of the country, southern rural women, Walker explains, did not remember the pre– World War I era as prosperous. However, conditions on the farm improved

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dramatically during the war, and war industries provided new jobs that lured large numbers from the land. Black sharecroppers particularly fled their dire economic plight and the repressive segregated society for opportunities in the North. Single black women found positions as domestics outside the South. The Great Depression arrived in the rural South immediately after World War I, long before it struck the rest of the country, but the economic nadir came during the s. Walker provides accounts of how women responded to the depression and the changes wrought by the New Deal, including how unintended negative consequences of programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration hurt black sharecroppers. World War II brought prosperity and changes to the rural South that dwarfed those that the World War I era had produced. Mechanization and the transformation from the family farm to large-scale agricultural business were the two most profound impacts. Again women’s lives were dramatically altered from a more active role in the actual farming operation to pursuing nonfarm industrial jobs. The quality of southern rural women’s lives continued to improve in the postwar decades, although the last years of the century did experience cycles of boom and bust. Walker’s theme is that throughout the century, southern rural women’s lives were continually reshaped and became increasingly complicated as they accommodated, adjusted, and took charge of new realities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of a rural South is harder and harder to find. For the most part, the countryside is merely an extension of urban areas, and rural life, even in the ever decreasing farming sector, is business. Few women are actually engaged in farming, and all the problems of urban America have made their way to rural communities. Both regional differences and rural-urban distinction have faded, and the pace of this direction is not likely to lessen in the twenty-first century. Rural women in the next century will not differ decidedly from those in the city. The change, diversity, and expanding parameters for women expressed by each contributor are reflected in the literature of southern women as well. After a brief survey of how the “canon” of southern literature changed over the century, Anne Goodwyn Jones focuses upon the rich tapestry of women’s lives as depicted in late-twentieth-century southern women writing about southern women. Her initial quote from Christie Anne Farnham is most appropriate: “Today’s scholarship seeks to uncover a more inclusive history by examining southern women in all of their rich diversity and moving beyond a biracial focus on the region’s past.” Jones provides abundant examples from the extracanon. Her theme is that the definition of what is a southern woman

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is growing in omnidirectional ways extending beyond the simpler dichotomies of race and social-economic class. The “other” southern female includes sexual orientation, nationality, more diverse ethnicities, previously unexplored subcultures, and complex psychological conditions. Jones concludes that the literature about and by southern women in the new millennium will continue in this direction as “more women in the South . . . become more real to each other, and more writers . . . help make this possible by representing their stories.” The South is the most traditionally religious region of the country, and women are the primary guardians of the faith. As Nancy Hardesty reports from a  poll,  percent of southerners considered religion very important to them, and  percent claimed to be church members—by far the highest percentage in the country. Only  percent of southerners asserted no religious affiliation. Clearly, the South registers the most homogeneous religious profile:  percent Protestant and only  percent Catholic, even greater in the Southeast at  percent Protestant and  percent Catholic. Forty-two percent of southerners were Baptist compared to only  percent for the entire nation. Indeed,  percent of all Baptists reside in the South. Noting that the issue of women and religion in the South is a neglected area of scholarship, Hardesty begins with a historical survey of religion in the region that sweeps over the major influences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and cites significant southern female figures. In recent decades, women have both achieved success in and encountered resistance to leadership roles. One battlefield has been ordination. Although some fundamentalist denominations such as the Church of God employed women ministers from the beginning of the century, most evangelicals do not extend these rights. Mainline denominations began ordination in midcentury with Methodist and Northern Presbyterians leading the way, followed later by Southern Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and others. Black churches have traditionally been more willing to extend ordination than have white churches. Southern Baptists remain among the most resistant, although individual church congregations have gone against official denominational policy to ordain a few women. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the South is increasingly diversified. The Sunbelt phenomenon attracts ever growing numbers of new residents from other areas of the country and from other countries. No place is this diversity more evident than in new religious expressions. Protestant hegemony is eroding. Catholicism is growing decisively in the South, and Judaism is becoming much more evident. So also are Unitarianism, Islam, Bahaism, Hinduism, and even Wiccan. Within the mainline Protestant de-

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nominations, Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian, Chinese, and other national expressions continue to emerge. Spartanburg, South Carolina, provides a good example of the changing religious profile of the region. Once as traditional as one could find, and still with a Baptist church seemingly on every corner, this I--corridor, Sunbelt, New Southern city, the center of the largest concentration of foreign investment of any county in the United States, now includes a mosque, a Hindu temple, Cambodian Buddhist associations, and a Hmong Alliance Church. As Hardesty concludes, the future will witness much more of the same. The constant will likely be that whatever the religious expression, even those that discriminate against women, females will be the core, energy, and often the leadership of most southern religious expressions. Carol Bleser’s concluding essay speaks to many of the themes addressed in the volume through recounting personal vignettes from her academic life and providing a lengthy memoir excerpt by a woman whose life, like that of my mother, spanned much of the twentieth century. Bleser notes that the pace of change in southern women’s lives accelerated in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the momentum will likely continue through the first half of the twenty-first century. She concludes that as a distinctive South wanes under the forces of national homogenization, the differences between southern women and those in other regions will dissipate as well. The South manifested a distinctive culture through most of the twentieth century. Because the South was unique, the history of southern women was different in fundamental ways from that of women across the nation. However, as a discernable social and cultural “South” is fast fading, the concept of a perceptible southern woman, as Bleser indicates, will diminish in the new millennium. Thus, the real saga may not be the future of “southern women,” but the story of women in the future who happen to reside in the region. Nevertheless, as historians we are interested in where we have been on the way to where we (as both men and women) are going. The varied essays of this volume address that quest.

s Spheres of Economic Activity among Southern Women in the Twentieth Century     

Jacqueline Jones

In March , one thousand employees of the Memphis Furniture plant in Memphis, Tennessee, walked off their jobs in an effort to win a fair union contract and to reclaim their dignity as workers in the process. Almost all African American women, the strikers relied on the support and goodwill of family members, friends, bill collectors, and local clergy. Emma Freeman and Mary Higgins, union stewards of Local , United Furniture Workers Union of America, later reflected on the working conditions that had impelled them and their coworkers to hold fast during the ten-week job action: regardless of seniority, most employees made little more than the minimum wage. Those husbands and wives who worked together at Memphis Furniture took home such low pay that they qualified for food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Higgins told of bosses who forced breakneck speedups and fired women who could not maintain the grueling pace: “Just like you would with a mule with the plow. All they wanted was just work.” Referring to the abusive language used regularly by white foremen, Higgins reflected that the strike was really about “dignity, self-respect. . . . We definitely went out for respect—more so, I think, than money.” In waging the strike, Local  engaged in what has been called civil rights unionism. The workers linked their cause with protests against oppressive racial and gender ideologies. Neighbors and kinfolk joined plant employees in mass meetings that Emma Freeman likened to religious revivals. Freeman herself derived strength from her faith—“We prayed together. We took ‘self ’ . June Rostan, “Fighting Spirit,” Southern Exposure  (winter ): –.

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out”—and also from the camaraderie on the picket line, day after day. When some of the pickets were arrested and sent to jail, they sang, “We Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around” and “We Shall Overcome.” To their surprise, they discovered that the prison matron was sympathetic to their cause. Noted Freeman, “She asked us what we were out on strike for and we told her: conditions, wages, benefits and everything. . . . She said, ‘I don’t blame you. Keep on!’” The  walkout succeeded in the short run—Local  got its contract—but Memphis Furniture workers soon lost their jobs. The company, a family-owned enterprise, closed its doors shortly after the strike. Meanwhile, other large Memphis employers, like Firestone Tire, International Harvester, and related factories, left the city and moved their operations elsewhere in the country, or overseas. Low-wage, nonunion clerical, sales, and service positions replaced the blue-collar manufacturing jobs that had formed the bedrock of Memphis’s laboring classes. Possessing little in the way of formal education or marketable skills, the women of Memphis Furniture, as well as other members of their communities, fell on desperately hard times. Despite the booming national economy of the early twenty-first century, they have not recovered. Within the context of a global economy, local worker solidarity failed to achieve decent, permanent jobs. As factory employees, Emma Freeman and Mary Higgins were not representative of southern working women of the twentieth century, or of the s for that matter. (In the s, four out of ten white working women, and fully half of their African American counterparts, labored in a “pink collar ghetto” of sales and service jobs. These figures had remained virtually the same since the s.) Yet their story reveals the complex theoretical issues that inform our inquiry into the economic activity of southern women during the past one hundred years. In an effort to streamline such a broad topic, I would suggest that four major issues demand our attention. First, we must explore the significance of women qua economic decision makers within their own communities. During the  strike, Emma Freeman, the head of her household and the mother of four, was forced to negotiate with her landlord and her creditors. Managing her family’s modest

. Ibid. . Michael Keith Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –. . Anne Eckman and Jordan Green with Peter Braash and David Shulman, “Job Equity in the Downsized South,” Southern Exposure (fall–winter ): –.

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budget, she relied on the cooperation and understanding of her children; she explained to them, “The bills probably would get behind, but don’t worry about it, that everything would be okay, but they had to work with me. And they were understanding.” In other circumstances, women helped to determine whether family members would be forced to migrate together or separately from each other in order to advance the economic well-being of their households, and whether they or other family members would be joining a union, quitting a job, buying or selling certain goods—all decisions that reflected women’s role in shaping their own economic condition as well as the economy of a certain locale. A second perspective focuses on women’s work. Defining work as any activity that yields goods or services, we should consider not only patterns of paid employment, but unwaged labor like peonage and prison labor, as well as services provided by neighbors and kin for each other, and political activism on the behalf of a community or a particular group. Emma Freeman and Mary Higgins engaged in a variety of forms of labor for which they received no direct financial compensation: as household members they worked for their families, and as union stewards they spent time and energy advancing the interests of the United Furniture Workers Union. Third, considering women as both workers and decision makers will allow us next to make generalizations about place through time—the regional and chronological dimensions of southern women’s economic condition during the twentieth century. This perspective allows us to chart the history of the group from the turn of the century, when staple-crop production and extractive and low value-added industries dominated the regional economy, to the late twentieth century, when the South lost its political-economic distinctiveness, and the conditions and concerns of southern women reflected broader national trends. Issues of ethnic and racial diversity, technological innovation in the workplace, and employer priorities help provide a context for discussions of particular groups of women at specific times over the past one hundred years. For example, drawing our historical lens back from the strike of , we can see how Memphis employers and politicians constricted the opportunities of African Americans, who were forced to fill the lowest jobs in the city’s warehouses and sawmills, on the docks, in the lumber industry, and in paper, furniture, and hardwood flooring manufacturing. A fourth dimension of women’s economic activity reveals contours of justice and power within the South, the nation, and the world during the twentieth century. Here we must explore the realm of formal institutions (like the . Rostan, “Fighting Spirit,” .

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nation-state, political parties, and systems of public education) and informal institutions (such as family and community values, and the means by which those values are expressed). Formal hierarchies of power based on age, class, gender, and other forms of “social difference” reveal the ways that individuals and groups were constrained from bettering their own economic condition, or advancing the economic condition of the South as a whole. At the same time, specific groups of women shared with their menfolk an oppositional culture that allowed them to challenge authority, at times in surreptitious, hidden ways. Class issues and racial ideologies loom large here. For example, African Americans represented  percent of the twentieth-century Memphis population, and they often competed with poor whites for jobs. In , during a bitter strike of Memphis Furniture workers, strikebreakers hired at the plant manufactured billy clubs that were in turn used by police against the white women workers who had walked off their jobs at the nearby American snuff plant. The virulent antiunion stance of the city’s political establishment could not dampen the sporadic militancy of workers, black and white. However, by the latter part of the twentieth century, many of the largest manufacturers chose to abandon the city altogether and seek more compliant workers in Mexico or Southeast Asia. How did the economic activities of southern women differ from those of their counterparts in other parts of the country? This question lies at the heart of our inquiry. In many respects, southern women’s roles as economic actors constitute but a subset of women’s roles in the nation at large. Throughout the twentieth century, American women have served as economic decision makers and as workers, at any one time reflecting regional and historical trends. Yet for much of the twentieth century, the South has remained unique in terms of, first, its persistent rurality and, second, the peculiar force with which racial ideologies have shaped class and gender relations. These forces have tended to estrange groups of women from each other, and to limit the potential of women to contribute fully to the southern economy as family members, as workers, and as citizens.

Taking a Mind to Leave or Stay, Buy or Sell, Advance a Cause Like women elsewhere in the United States, southern women participate in and influence local economies when they make choices as money managers, family members, and workers. Here we must remain alert to the possibility

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that narrow choices are often not really “choices” at all. For example, as consumers, poor women might patronize flea markets rather than more established businesses. Their poverty might cause them to rely on certain sources of credit that they would avoid if they had the resources to do so. Pawn shops, used-car dealers, second-mortgage and finance companies, trade schools, rent-to-own shops, and debt collectors continue to take advantage of wives and mothers (and husbands and fathers) who cannot afford (or are denied) legitimate forms of credit. As late as the s, Tennessee allowed finance companies to charge their customers up to  percent a year, Georgia  percent a year. Likewise, among the poorest of southerners, a fine line separates choosing to move to another plantation, or up north, and being forced to move. In the countryside, rural families often “shifted” to another landlord at the end of the year during “reckoning” time; they made their decisions according to a complex matrix of factors related to the proximity of the local school, the contractual terms offered by various landlords, the size of their families, and their needs for certain kinds of housing. In , more than  percent of whites and about  percent of blacks had been on the same farm for less than a year. More generally, the history of the southern diaspora in the twentieth century illustrates that women and men as individuals and family members could seize the chance to seek a better life elsewhere, even as circumstances outside their control (technological innovation, political oppression, and violence) meant that they had little real choice in the matter. Taken together, women’s decisions to join or otherwise support labor unions, to spend less on store-bought clothes and to raise more food during hard times, and to work outside the home have played a role in shaping regional labor markets and economies. At the same time, we must tread carefully when we attempt to assign motivation to individual women, in the process wrenching them from their social context. To a great extent, all women are embedded in networks of kin and community. Thus, attempting to isolate their decision-making capacity from that of their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers inevitably proves to be problematic. Indeed, it would be myopic and historically inaccurate to consider women’s economic activities as somehow separate and distinct from those of the men around them. . Mike Hudson, “The Poverty Industry,” Southern Exposure  (fall ): –. . Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, ), –; W. J. Spillman and E. A. Goldenweiser, “Farm Tenantry in the United States,” in  United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), .

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As historians, we would do well to avoid compartmentalizing groups of people (women among them) into neat categories, and then ascribing overarching motivations or characteristics to them. Twentieth-century southern women, like all women everywhere, have inhabited concentric and overlapping spheres of social identification. Who is to say that when the African American civil right activist Fannie Lou Hamer defied her landlord-employer in the s, she was acting exclusively as a black person, as a poor person, or as a woman? Furthermore, we must recognize that expansive terms like motherhood can lead us down some unanticipated pathways as we attempt to determine what women have shared, and why and how they acted from a specific gender identification. In her book Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith credited, or rather indicted, white women for their cultural work of socializing generations of young southerners in the ways and means of the Jim Crow system. Consider, for example, the white middle-class women who so angrily protested the first appearance of the Little Rock Nine—the nine black teenagers who integrated Little Rock High School in September . As mothers, these women sought to protect their prerogatives as whites generally, and to advance the interests of their own children more particularly. School integration meant that their daughters and sons would no longer necessarily possess the privileges of a white skin, privileges that carried a substantial cash value in the labor force. With their exclusive notions of motherhood, they believed that their direct competitors were the African American mothers determined to challenge time-honored patterns of white supremacy. It is clear, then, that in evaluating the ideas and actions of women within the realm of the southern economy, we must guard against the presupposition that individual women and groups of women naturally or instinctively filtered their interests through a lens of universal womanhood. To approach the theme of working women this way would be a recipe for disaster, or at least disappointment, so powerfully have racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices divided women as a group. Indeed, differences in work experience have both symbolized and revealed the distinct roles and statuses of black and white women. In early-twentieth-century North Carolina, poor white women toiling in the sun-baked tobacco fields pointedly refrained from singing with their black coworkers as they desperately clung to some semblance of “racial” superiority. Most women act with a number of considerations in mind (or at least in the back of their minds): the well-being of their households, their perceived . Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, ).

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class or “racial” interests, ideas about what a just or good society should look like. Our analysis of women’s choices, then, must be grounded in their particular circumstances, and the factors of individual temperament, family and community values, and larger political imperatives that shape those circumstances. This approach suggests that we must refrain from generalizing about all southern women, and instead investigate the peculiar mix of historical factors and contemporary conditions affecting certain groups of women within a specific time and place.

Worlds of Work Virtually all twentieth-century southern women worked, and most worked in a number of different capacities during their lifetimes. However, the question of what constitutes work has been a highly contested issue throughout much of southern history, up to and including the past one hundred years. In the early twentieth century, federal census takers listed wives and mothers “at home,” obscuring their domestic labors in the areas of child rearing, cooking, and cleaning; their informal wage-earning activities as laundresses, seamstresses, and keepers of boardinghouses; their arduous field work that contributed to the family income; and the services that they provided free of charge for neighbors, kinfolk, and community institutions. White employers tended to denigrate the labor black women did on behalf of their own families and claimed that only paid labor performed under the supervision of whites constituted “real work.” In the late twentieth century, the harried, high-powered Atlanta lawyer gained public recognition for her efforts on the job (downtown), while her considerable after-hours labors at home (in the suburbs) were considered “family time”—that is, not really work at all. Indeed, in the last decade of the twentieth century, the fact that about six out of ten working mothers in the Atlanta metropolitan region had children under six years of age suggests their “double duty” in the paid workplace and in the home. In and of itself, the issue of paid labor is almost limitless in its complexity and social implications. Of any employment we must ask, what are the terms and conditions of the work itself? Financial compensation does not always heighten the prestige or appeal of work in the eyes of the woman who is doing . Sandra Opdycke, “Recent Trends in Women’s Work,” in The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America (New York: Routledge, ), .

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it. For example, African American women who earned money by cooking for white families often wished that they could afford to spend more time at home, engaged in kitchen labors in behalf of their own families. Is a woman compensated decently for the job she does? Does the job itself endanger her health? (Consider the respiratory hazards and other ills associated with the labor of textile-factory operatives, tobacco-processing workers, coal miners, and migrant laborers in close proximity to pesticides.) What is the social configuration of the workplace (that is, the relative status of men and women, blacks and whites, adults and children, immigrants and the native born)? Is the division of labor institutionalized to the extent that certain groups cannot aspire to better-paying positions? Answers to these questions allow us to place paid employment within its sociohistorical context. Obviously, the terms of labor are a crucial component to analyzing the job itself. Even in the twentieth century, some southern women engaged in forms of forced labor. Farm families held in virtual peonage existed in a limbo of sorts between freedom and slavery; as households indebted to a landlord, they were often threatened with legal action or physical violence if they tried to move on. By definition, incarcerated women worked without receiving financial compensation. And too, at times, illegal aliens (for example, those working as agricultural migrant laborers) have found it nearly impossible to secure the wages they earned and that were promised to them. Deprived of the right to organize, migrant workers like the Mexican “guest workers” toiling in the cucumber fields of North Carolina in the late twentieth century compared themselves to indentured servants, so little control did they have over their wages and working and living conditions. And finally, women who worked at illegal activities—in organized gambling, bootlegging, drug dealing or prostitution, for example—were particularly vulnerable to violence and police harassment. Before , disproportionate numbers of southern women (compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the country) combined field work with household labors. More specifically, they participated in the commercial economy (by cultivating staple crops), in the domestic economy (by cooking and cleaning in the house), and in the reproductive economy (by bearing and rearing children). On this last point it is significant that during much of the first half of the twentieth century, southern women had far higher fertility rates than women in other areas of the country. (In , the southern child. Somini Sengupta, “Farm Union Takes Aim at a Big Pickle Maker,” New York Times, October , , A.

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woman ratio for every , women was ., and . in the rural South, compared to . in the non-South.) For black, white, and Hispanic women, these combined labors were physically grueling, when they stooped over to pick tobacco or cotton and when they lugged water and firewood into the house. The work was also emotionally taxing as they cooked, cleaned, and cared for children, making do with little in the way of cash or conveniences. Clearly, we should examine worlds of women’s work in the most comprehensive way possible. In this endeavor it is also helpful to consider the female life stage. Many girls shared the responsibility for helping their mothers perform domestic labor at home, and some children, like the daughters of tobacco tenants and cotton sharecroppers, toiled in the fields at relatively young ages. Well into the twentieth century, as an agricultural region, the South had relatively high rates of female-child labor. The expansion of the migrant labor stream in the s meant that the child labor force increased in size and, by the s, ethnic diversity. An individual’s self-consciousness about the work she does or sees around her changes over the course of her lifetime. Interviews with women who grew up in Appalachia early in the century suggest that despite the straitened circumstances of their households as young girls, many felt enveloped by the love of family and community, and lived lives that were relatively happy and carefree. Yet at the same time, those girls’ mothers struggled from day to day to make ends meet and worried about the health and safety of their husbands at work in the coal mines and lumber camps. Just as racial, ethnic, class, and religious differences could divide a community of women in any particular place, so too could generational differences within a single family reveal varied perspectives on the household economy and the place of girls and women in it. For much of the century, women reached their peak earning power outside the home when they were quite young. Urban middle-class daughters who worked as telephone operators or department store clerks experienced a relatively brief encounter with the world of paid labor before they married. Before marrying and working side by side with their new husbands, sharecroppers’ daughters toiled as “full hands” in the cotton fields for their fathers. . Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, ), . . See, for example, Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ).

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Although poor women have had the highest rates of paid–labor force participation, it is crucial to understand the myriad responsibilities assumed by all classes of wives and mothers within their communities. Over the past few years, historians have enumerated the many forms of unwaged community service performed by southern women through voluntary associations, church groups, social welfare organizations, and women’s clubs. For African American women especially, political activism often blended the realms of social welfare, civil rights, and economic well-being. In early-twentieth-century Atlanta, Lugenia Burns Hope was moved to create a safe playground for her children and her neighbors’ children. Her efforts in that realm expanded to yield the Neighborhood Union, a social settlement. Eventually, she became active in black–voter registration drives. This progression from motherly concern to neighborly responsibility and finally confrontational politics was characteristic of many black women activists during the twentieth century. To cite another example: As a young schoolteacher on the South Carolina coastal islands, Mamie Garvin found herself responsible not just for instructing one hundred children in the classroom but also for battling a local school trustee for her fair share of supplies and other resources. (In response to her request he thundered, “Yah got too minny [children] t’ han’l? Jes’ shut it daln, Ga’vin. Shut it daln!”) To the extent that their efforts affected the status of African Americans as (potential) workers and consumers, women like Garvin and Hope revealed the close and enduring connection between economics and politics, broadly defined. Women’s unpaid labor could also be empowering. Maggie Lena Walker, founder of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond and the country’s first woman bank president, was a moving force behind the Independent Order of St. Luke, a mutual aid society that evolved into an engine of local black economic development. In the s, some African American women supported Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist organization, the United Negro Improvement Association. The efforts of Ella Baker in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and young women like Ruby Doris Smith Robinson in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee of the early s, demonstrated a seamless and timeless connection among a variety of forms of empowerment—individual, social, political, economic. The fact that these women often encountered the condescension, if not the hostility, . Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ); Mamie Garvin Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York: Free Press, ), .

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of men involved in these same organizations suggests that gender tensions helped shape both the style and the substance of women’s leadership patterns. At times, women’s roles as mothers impelled them to become involved in unions and other workers’ groups. In the s, strikes among tobacco workers drew energy from women’s concerns about the welfare of their families, and their own (and their female coworkers’) responsibilities as breadwinners. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in , black workers formed the Tobacco Workers Organizing Committee (with the backing of the United Cannery Agricultural Packinghouse and Allied Workers of America–CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]). Thedosia Simpson later described a scene that affected her deeply one day in June of that year: At work she watched a woman next to her, a widow with five children, fall ill and lag behind in her work. When the boss fired her, “She started crying and went into hysteria, because she had these children to rear, and nobody working but her.” Simpson acted upon her own outrage by helping to lead a work stoppage. Through the generations, low-income women, together with their menfolk, have found a political voice in various struggles that affected the health and welfare of their families. Women’s involvement in the Industrial Workers of the World in the Texas labor camps of the early twentieth century, in the Share Croppers Union in Alabama and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas in the s, and in the civil rights movement of the s and s (and beyond) testified to a collective impulse among poor women. Within the past couple of decades or so, southern women have mobilized against toxic dumps, pesticides in the workplace, and other local environmental hazards. The Lumbee of southeastern North Carolina formed the Center for Community Action to fight against chemical treatment plants, radioactive waste incinerators, and a large nuclear dump. In Columbia, Alabama, a church-based group called Jesus People Against Pollution launched . Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs  (spring ): –; Barbara Bair, “Renegotiating Liberty: Garveyism, Women, and Grassroots Organizing in Virginia,” in Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Christie Anne Farnham (New York: New York University Press, ), –; Cynthia Griggs Fleming, “‘More Than a Lady’: Ruby Doris Smith Robinson and Black Women’s Leadership in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, ), –; Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, ), –.

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a campaign against toxic poisoning of their water supply. According to Charlotte Keys, founder of the group, when the Reichold Chemical Company “abandoned the site in , the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] discovered that the whole city drinking water supply had been poisoned by benzene, toluene, lead, and many other deadly cancer-causing chemicals.” In Florida, worker advocates like Magarita Romo, director of Farmworkers SelfHelp, lobbied against the extensive use of pesticides in the fields, a practice that led agricultural laborers to “suffer from the highest rate of toxic-related injuries in the nation.” Other disadvantaged southern women found a political voice. In the s, a new term, displaced homemaker, defined a particular stage in the lives of certain wives: the time when divorce, desertion, or a husband’s disability forced women to assume responsible for their own economic well-being and that of their children. In Louisville, Kentucky, the YWCA Creative Employment Project offered counseling to women like Faye Eagle, fifty years old, who was forced to find a job outside the home after her truck-driver husband suffered a series of heart attacks. Eagle, like other displaced homemakers, learned that the skills they had acquired in the course of managing a household, rearing children, and volunteering in community activities did not necessarily translate into a marketable résumé. For these women, the transition between unwaged household labor and the paid workforce was particularly painful. Southern women have done other types of labor unlikely to be visible to government officials or to translate into marketable job skills. In rural areas throughout much of the South, older women worked as midwives and as folk healers, both types of labor that were unlikely to appear on a census taker’s form. In the realm of folk art, women either singly or in groups produced quilts and other kinds of needlework, and music (using instruments or the human voice). These forms of artistic expression did not always carry a specific cash value; still, they enriched southern culture, and provided a useful contrast to waged labor in terms of benefits accrued by individual families and communities. Alice Walker praised her mother’s beautiful flower garden, the product of much time and hard work, as a source of pride and inspiration within her impoverished household during the s. Walker . Mary Lee Kerr and Charles Lee, “From Conquistadors to Coalitions,” Southern Exposure  (winter ): –. . Dana Alder, “Kentucky: Creative Employment Project,” Southern Exposure  (winter ): –.

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asserts, “Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms—sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena . . . and on and on.” Her mother’s unwaged labor in the family garden thus constituted a particularly meaningful kind of cultural work. The significance of the family life cycle reminds us that patterns of work are symbiotic among household members and between various groups of laborers. Within the middle classes, wives performed unwaged labor at home so that husbands could devote their energies to earning money outside the home. With the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in , child labor became illegal. The effect was to draw the mothers of underage textile mill workers into the labor force to compensate for the lost wages of their sons and daughters. The historic imbalance between black men and women’s urban employment rates testified to the fact that women were forced to take ubiquitous domestic service jobs in order to compensate for the pervasive discrimination faced by their menfolk in city labor markets. The uniqueness and extent of southern women’s labor is revealed in the persistent rural-agricultural character of the southern economy. Until the widespread use of the mechanical cotton picker in the late s and s, most women in the wide swath called the Cotton Belt toiled in the fields. Their compensation was subsumed under the pay—often in the form of unfulfilled promises—accorded their families by landlords. Textile mills and other company towns often relied on a family wage system, by which sons and daughters, as well as husbands and wives, worked for wages outside the home. Well into the twentieth century, in rural areas of the South, households pieced together a living by combining hunting, fishing, sporadic wage work, and help from neighbors. In effect, they reproduced the social networks that had informed communities of yeoman farmers in the nineteenth century. Moreover, particularly exploitative forms of work—systems of sharecropping, peonage, and prison labor, for example—derived both from the South’s overwhelmingly rural character and from the racial ideologies that put a premium on the class and “racial” prerogatives of landed white men. And finally, as we noted above, for a substantial part of the century, the realities of Jim Crow repression challenged mothers of all kinds to instruct their children in ways either to uphold the strictures of white supremacist ideologies or to . Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), .

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challenge them. This form of work helped to shape the economic productivity—in terms of either privileges gained or opportunities denied—of subsequent generations of southerners.

Time and Place in Southern Women’s Economic History To bring some order to this broad topic, it is helpful to offer a rough typology of women’s work throughout the past one hundred years. Women have performed domestic labors and provided community services without pay. At the same time, we can discuss the history of waged labor according to one of four sectors in which it was performed: agriculture or extractive industries, private or commercial domestic labor (cooking, cleaning, child care), manufacturing, and the professions. The most striking change in southern women’s economic condition is revealed in the steady decline of female agricultural laborers over the course of the twentieth century. In , the South far outstripped other areas of the country in terms of the number of people gainfully employed in agriculture ( percent, in contrast to  percent in the Northeast,  percent in the Midwest, and  percent in the Far West). By , less than  percent of all southerners were agricultural workers. Beginning in the s and s, the rigid racial division of labor characteristic of southern history began to recede, as did the South’s overwhelming dependence on staple-crop agriculture. By the year , the region’s economy showed clear vestiges of earlier patterns at the same time it was becoming integrated into the larger national and global economies. In the South today, “racial” differences often mean less than class differences (as shaped by formal education) within the paid labor force. And, for the first time in history, ethnic diversity is exerting a powerful force on the economic condition of southern women and men. Of course, it is difficult to generalize about the South overall. Regional economies, and their transformations over the past century, remain crucial to our analysis. The old Cotton Belt, which defined much of the South’s peculiar demography and politics until well into the s, now is home to diverse industries and services. In Appalachia, self-sufficient farms and the extractive industries of coal mining and lumber cutting, so prominent during . Irene B. Taueber and Conrad Taueber, People of the United States in the Twentieth Century, United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census Publication (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), .

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the early part of the century, have to some extent given way to, or are at least complemented by, the tourist industry. On the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands, the small landholdings once worked by the descendants of slaves have been replaced by retirement condos and golf courses. Texas, a former king of cotton production, now produces chemicals, oil, and a host of other products. Florida, once the site of commercial fishing, truck farming, and seafood and tobacco processing, now serves as a retirement haven for senior citizens, a world-class entertainment playground, and a center of agribusiness. In North Carolina, the textile mill villages and tobacco towns have metamorphosed into centers of high technology and higher education. Throughout the South, major cities, previously cotton distribution centers, are now home to world financial services. It is tempting to divide early-twentieth-century southerners into the two “racial” categories of black and white. However, the region has always contained significant pockets of ethnic diversity. (Out of a total of . million people, . million were native-born whites, . million were blacks, and , were foreign-born.) It is true that by , the descendants of antebellum German and Irish immigrants had lost much of their ethnic selfidentification, which had helped shape urban labor markets in the s and s. However, sprinkled throughout the Mississippi Valley were small clusters of Jews (with both men and women employed in commercial enterprises), as well as Chinese families that operated small grocery stores. German landowners and Mexican field hands in Texas; Italian cotton pickers on Arkansas plantations; Polish food processors on the Gulf Coast; Cuban, Spanish, and Italian cigar makers in Tampa; and Native American laborers in Louisiana lumber camps—these groups remind us that the South of  was not ethnically homogeneous. The large number of outside investors who drained profits from the region, the isolation of the southern labor market, and the poverty of many southerners who lacked the ability to become consumers of fashionable goods and services impeded southern economic growth. In contrast to the North, the South relied less on heavy manufacturing and more on agriculture and extraction—mining, fishing, and low value-added industries like tobacco and food processing. During the nineteenth century, southern elites had discouraged technological innovation and economic diversification. As inher. Statistical History of the United States, from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, ), ; Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review  (February ): –.

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ently conservative men, they feared that the South’s peculiar class relations would be disrupted by forces of industrial development. Accordingly, the South as a whole lagged behind other parts of the country in terms of its consumer activity. Early in the twentieth century, forces of modernization, especially in the cities, expanded employment opportunities for a small segment of middleclass, relatively well-educated young women. In the largest southern cities, single white women found jobs as secretaries and office receptionists, telephone operators, department store clerks, social workers, and public school teachers. Within the limited confines of their own communities, a small number of black women had access to these same jobs. Thus, the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, boasted women professionals in jobs that would not become more universally accessible to southern African American women until the s. Reflecting high rates of landlessness among the rural population in , certain traditional patterns of postbellum women’s work remained intact. For the most part, black women labored as members of sharecropping or farm-tenant households, or as domestic servants. In absolute terms, white women outnumbered black women as agricultural laborers (that is, as members of farm households where women were drawn into the fields during the harvest season). For example, in , , white households were either agricultural tenants or sharecroppers (about one-third of the white farm population), while , black households fell into the nonlandowner category (about  percent of all black farm families). Throughout the twentieth century, the rates of southern tenancy outstripped comparable rates in the Northeast and Midwest. In , about  percent of all southern farm families did not own their own land; in the North, the figure was  percent. Dependency was not limited to sharecroppers. Women residents of ruralbased southern extractive-industry company towns faced particular difficulties as family members and would-be workers. Whether they lived in lumber towns in Texas, lumber camps and coal mines in Appalachia, or phosphate and turpentine camps in Florida, wives and mothers had little choice but to patronize company stores with their high prices and crippling credit policies. Relying primarily on the labor of black and white men, these company towns offered few employment opportunities for women. By the s, a number of factors contributed to the formation of the East . Booker T. Washington, “A Town Owned by Negroes,” World’s Work  (July ): –. . Statistical History, ; Wright, Old South, New South, .

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Coast migrant labor stream that moved up the East Coast “on the season” to harvest fruits and vegetables. Mexicans began to immigrate into the Texas cotton fields. In the process, they displaced native-born sharecroppers who, in turn, formed the bulk of a new class of agricultural laborers. The stream would become systematized in the coming years. Beginning with harvests of string beans and oranges in Florida in February, workers moved up through eastern Georgia and North Carolina in the spring, into New Jersey in the summer, and ended with the apple orchards of New York State in early fall. Like sharecropping, migrant labor was a family enterprise. Low wages forced all family members to work. During the s, the Great Depression pushed increasing numbers of poor whites into this stream, but in coming years it would be characterized primarily by African Americans, offshore workers, and (by the s) “Third Wave” immigrants. Southern women, white and black, bore and nurtured the large numbers of children necessary to fuel the staple-crop economy. As a result, by World War I, an overabundance of rural agricultural labor meant that local economies would not be dramatically affected by the out-migration of either whites or blacks to the North. It was during this period that whites, especially those from Appalachia, began to move away from the region in large numbers; they tended to settle in manufacturing centers of the Midwest. Between  and , about  million people, whites slightly outnumbering blacks in absolute terms, left the South; most of them headed due north, with migrants on the East Coast eventually settling in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston; folks from Appalachia heading to industrial centers like Dayton, Cincinnati, and Detroit; and blacks from the Delta moving up the Mississippi Valley to Chicago and Detroit. For poor white women who stayed in the South, textile mill work remained a major category of employment. Though ill-paid, arduous, and hazardous to health, this work offered relative advantages compared to field labor. In the mill villages, wives and mothers could count on the cash wages earned by family members. In , , children worked in the southern textile industry, and well through the s fully one-quarter of all southerners at work in that industry were children. These youngsters had access to public or company-owned schools, if only for a couple of months of the year, and their families lived in company-owned houses, usually superior to the modest dwellings inhabited by sharecroppers and farm tenants. Moreover, textile work provided all whites with a sense of relative advantage over . Jones, Dispossessed, –. . Ron Nixon, “Working in Harm’s Way,” Southern Exposure  (fall–winter ): .

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the black people who were routinely barred from working machines in the postbellum South. White women played prominent roles in strikes and other collective action that rocked the southern textile industry during the late s and early s. In , rayon workers in Elizabethton, Tennessee, made $. for a fifty-six-hour workweek. Anticipating the grievances of the Memphis Furniture workers in the s and s, and Mississippi catfish processors in the s, Elizabethton employees objected not only to rock-bottom wages, but also to the petty regulations that made life on the job miserable. Bosses would not allow the Elizabethton women to wear makeup to work, to sing on the job, or to use the bathroom without first gaining permission. The strike yielded only modest gains for workers, but it strengthened the resolve of at least some employees for the battles to come. In September , at its peak, a three-week general strike of Piedmont textile workers claimed the energies of , workers. Yet their demands for a minimum wage, protection of union employees, and union recognition largely failed, and their union, the United Textile Workers, collapsed. In  in Atlanta, United Automobile Workers (UAW), Local , struck and thereby foreshadowed the dramatic UAW revolts that rocked Michigan plants the following year. Recalling her and her husband’s support for this job action, one woman noted, “When you see your child not having enough to eat, it is enough to put a fight in anybody. It certainly did in us.” Overall, however, sporadic attempts at unionization gained little headway in the South outside the auto industry; one reason was the threat of the reserve labor force that waited in the countryside—black men, women, and children who would have gladly traded their heavy cotton hoes for a chance to work in factories and cotton mills. The Great Depression devastated the southern economy. Dependent on systems of credit, sharecropping collapsed. (The number of southern farmers reached an all-time high in , when . million farm households worked the land; that number included about  million landless white families, and , landless black families.) Investigating the conditions of white tenant farm women in North Carolina in the mid-s, the sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood observed wives and mothers who engaged in heroic efforts to help provide for their families. They worked in the tobacco and cotton fields, . Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History  (): –. . Marc S. Miller, ed., Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South (New York: Pantheon, ), .

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raised hogs, cultivated vegetable gardens, sold eggs, and strung tobacco sacks for cash. In southern cities, some white women, formerly employed as secretaries and department store clerks, now sought work as domestic servants and pushed black women out of the paid labor force altogether. New Deal programs had a mixed effect upon the economic condition of southern women during the s. On the one hand, the National Recovery Administration and other agencies helped to erode the isolation of southern labor markets and bring workers in the region more in line with national standards. Programs like Social Security () and the Fair Labor Standards Act () represented at least a trend toward uniform policies regarding old-age insurance, minimum wages and maximum hours, and unemployment compensation. Black and white women alike sought employment under various federal works projects—for example, middle-class women through the Federal Writers Project and poor women through the Works Project Administration. Expanded federal programs created jobs for well-educated women as social workers, secretaries, and other kinds of clerical employees. The wives of landowning farmers benefited when their households received subsidy checks intended to cover the costs incurred when they planted fewer acres of cotton in order to bolster prices. The Wagner Act of  spurred the growth of labor unions in a variety of industries, guaranteeing employees the right to organize and bargain collectively for the first time. On the other hand, the New Deal exacerbated differences between groups of women—blacks and whites, blue-collar workers and sharecroppers, rich and poor—and in the process adversely affected the status of poor black women. The landowners who received monthly checks from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and then evicted their sharecroppers (black or white) often invested the money in tractors, which further eroded the demand for agricultural labor. The rise of the Share Croppers Union (in Alabama) and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (in Arkansas) revealed the disastrous effects of such policies on poor women of both races. In the tobacco plants of Raleigh and Durham, employers responded to minimum-wage legislation by installing labor-saving machinery and throwing African American women out of work. The policies of the National Recovery Act institutionalized wage differentials that blatantly discriminated against blacks, southerners, and rural workers. Public works projects distinguished between poor black and white women in terms of the number and types of jobs offered. For example, in the South, only black women were . Statistical History, ; Hagood, Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, ).

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employed on the euphemistically titled “beautification” projects. White administrators in North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia justified these projects by arguing that they simply required the women involved to do “landscaping [and] wild flower planting . . . pointing out that this is the only suitable form of employment for these Negro women, since they cannot sew.” Black women had to perform “men’s” jobs outdoors, and some of them even had to wear a special uniform, “stamping them,” in the words of one critic, “as some sort of convicts.” In contrast, poor white women eagerly took public works jobs that not only provided their families with a modest income, but also led to the production of goods that benefited needy families. For example, by the late s, Atlanta sewers had made more than four million garments that had been donated to needy individuals as well as the inmates of public institutions. In these ways, federal programs helped reify long-standing differences in the opportunities and status of black and white women. More generally, New Deal labor and social-welfare legislation favored workers that tended to be underrepresented in the South. Men and women employed full-time by large companies benefited from Social Security and other entitlement programs and protection laws. Domestic servants, field workers, and seasonal workers remained outside the purview of much New Deal legislation for many years (and, in the case of migrant laborers, throughout the twentieth century). World War II economic and manpower mobilization transformed the South. Black and white families left in large numbers and improved their economic condition in the process. (In the decade of the s, . percent of the total southern population migrated from the region. This level matched the high out-migration rate of the s.) Blacks moved to the Far West for the first time and settled in the Bay Area. In the Northwest, they took jobs in the ship building industry. Poor white southern women who found their way north possessed little in the way of formal education or skills, but they had an advantage over their African American counterparts when it came to obtaining semiskilled jobs in factories. Within the South, defense plants provided jobs for white women as early as ; black women and men waited until the midwar years to be hired by these plants. When white women moved off the countryside to take factory jobs, black women moved in to replace them in mostly unskilled and service positions. . Martha H. Swain, “A New Deal for Southern Women: Gender and Race in Women’s Relief Work,” in Women of the American South, ed. Farnham, . . Taueber and Taueber, People of the United States, , .

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In the late s, a concerted organizing drive (“Operation Dixie”) sponsored by the Congress of Industrial Organizations highlighted the characteristics of southern labor that would prove especially attractive to companies seeking to relocate away from the high-wage Northeast. The intense hostility to unions shared by local officials and employers hindered efforts to organize southern white men and women. State legislators were reluctant to pass regulatory laws that might interfere with employers’ ability to shape the workplace and recruit laborers. The cold war tainted union activity of all kinds with the charge of “un-Americanism” and “communism.” As a whole, the white southern labor force demonstrated persistent hostility toward black workers whom they considered job competitors. When white politicians and antiunion employers denounced the CIO for its radicalism, they implicitly (and at times explicitly) tapped into the fears of whites who clung so precariously to their own privileges in the workplace. Meanwhile, the gradual wartime depletion of the southern rural labor force and AAA payments to landowners stimulated the use of agricultural technology for the first time in history. The mechanical cotton picker made an appearance in the late s and over the next three decades dramatically reduced the demand for farmhands. By , about  percent of the southern cotton crop was being harvested by the mechanical cotton picker. Nevertheless, traditional patterns of migratory labor prevailed. Southern truck-farm owners began to rely more heavily on braceros (Mexican immigrants) and offshore workers, both groups dominated by men. The nativeborn migratory labor force consisted predominantly but not exclusively of African American men and women. These developments provided the backdrop for the civil rights movement of the s and s. Century-long hierarchies began to crumble under pressure from the movement itself, and from the decline of labor-intensive staple-crop agriculture. Local southern officials sought to encourage the infusion of private capital and to seek federal grants for cold war defense plants. In the midst of these developments, southern chambers of commerce became a mediating, and in some cases moderating, force between reactionary politicians and employers, on the one hand, and black activists, on the other. The iconography and reality of Jim Crow on the defensive—the police dogs and billy clubs, the Ku Klux Klan and other defiant segregationists—proved to be bad for business. The African American freedom movement derived not only from the blocked ballot box, but also from the Jim Crow workplace. A range of black . Wright, Old South, New South, .

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women workers translated harsh working conditions and thwarted aspirations into the cause for civil rights. These workers included Montgomery domestics, Selma schoolteachers, Mississippi sharecroppers, as well as women lawyers and college students throughout the South. The struggle, of course, had profound implications for women’s economic condition. The freedom rides and lunch-counter sit-ins aimed to open commercial services to blacks as consumers throughout the South. School integration went to the heart of an age-old injustice: that black men and women as taxpayers were not receiving their due from local educational officials, and that their children would remain at a terrible economic disadvantage in an increasingly credentialsconscious society. In , the South was poised on the brink of a radical transformation in its economy and society. The liabilities that affected poor black and white women alike were manifest. Almost  percent of the southern population over twenty-five had had less than five years of formal schooling. Compared to its northern counterpart, the southern clerical sector was small, providing relatively fewer lower-level white-collar jobs, and the service sector was large, signifying a preponderance of low-wage, manual jobs. Title VII of the  Civil Rights Act eliminated the last legal foundations of Jim Crow, and also outlawed employment discrimination on the basis of gender. Though this transition was not without its problems, for the first time, black women were hired as secretaries and textile mill operatives. In textile mills, white workers reacted angrily and defensively. Employers looked for a certain kind of black woman worker—preferably one who was young and light-skinned. At the same time, foreign competition was beginning to erode the vitality of the southern textile industry altogether. In the s, the southern economy in general began to lose some of its distinctive features, including systems of labor-intensive staple-crop agriculture, and racial hierarchies rigidly encoded in law. Mirroring national trends, the southern service sector began to grow during this era. Composed of fast food restaurants, shopping centers, health care services, and an expanded tourist industry (in Florida, Appalachia, and along the eastern seaboard), this sector opened up low-wage jobs for black and white women. Meanwhile, southern women, like their counterparts in other parts of the country, started to push the boundaries of the gender and racialized division of labor. They pressed for jobs as coal miners, truck drivers, construction workers, and electricians. Sandra Baily of Mayking, Kentucky, worked as a waitress, school bus driver, shoe factory and school lunchroom employee, and Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) van driver. She took a job as a coal miner, and after six years was promoted to safety inspector.

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Speaking of the trade-offs involved in such high-risk work, she claimed that she had reached the point where she could balance the danger of the job (“[T]here must be a thousand ways to kill yourself in a coal mine”) with her love of the job (“You have so much independence as a miner, to do the job, not necessarily at your own pace, but to choose your priorities as to what to do first with very little supervision. You can see the fruit of your labor, it’s visible.”). In Tennessee, the Coal Employment Project was formed to provide support for other women miners, and answer questions posed by pregnant workers: “How long should I continue my work? Is there anything in the mining environment that could hurt my baby?” In the region’s largest cities, women began to make inroads into law, banking, and corporate management. However, given the overall low levels of schooling on the part of southern women (and men), many of the best-paying jobs went to well-educated outsiders from other parts of the country, and from other countries. Indeed, by this time, patterns of in-migration, combined with the spread of a national consumer and entertainment culture, revealed that the South was becoming part of the global, as well as national, economy. By the late s, the South’s rates of net internal migration were the highest of any region in the United States. Included in these numbers were northern blacks who sought in some cases the slower pace of smalltown life, and, in other cases, the expanded opportunities in the metropolitan Sunbelt for well-educated people of all backgrounds. Lacking any sense of southern identity, historic or otherwise, whites from other parts of the country further diluted the folkways of their adopted home. If the South began to share in northern prosperity in the latter part of the twentieth century, it also began to share in the vulnerabilities associated with regional economies embedded in the global economy. Foreign competition affected North Carolina textile workers and Atlanta auto industry employees when manufacturers sought to cut costs and introduce labor-saving technology like computers and robotics. Foreign and domestic automakers opened new plants in the South where many workers proved to be stubbornly resistant to union organization. Together with their menfolk, women workers at plants like Black and Decker in Turbary, North Carolina, lost not only their . Margaret Bacon, “Common Concerns: Programs in Four States Are Helping Women Get Better Jobs and Working Conditions,” Southern Exposure  (winter ): –; Marat Moore, “Coalmining Women,” Southern Exposure  (winter ): ; “Pregnant and Mining,” Southern Exposure  (March–April ): . . Statistical Abstract of the United States, , United States Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), .

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jobs but also their hard-won pensions when their former employers closed their doors and removed their operations to Mexico or elsewhere, or succumbed to hostile corporate takeovers. In Kannapolis, North Carolina, an investor bought Cannon Mills and raided the company’s pension fund of all $ million, leaving thirteen thousand workers to depend almost exclusively on their modest Social Security checks to survive. Moreover, the southern economy (especially in the countryside) revealed vestiges of an earlier era. The social division of labor remained intact for women workers. In  in the rural South, black women dominated in the category of private household workers, while white women were disproportionately represented in the occupations of managers, teachers, and clerical employees. Poor women continued to labor according to the time-honored traditions of their foremothers. A survey of households in rural West Virginia found that three-quarters of all women kept farm animals and raised gardens, and  percent participated in informal networks of exchange (for tools, food, and child care services) among neighbors and extended family. More than one-third of these households relied on hunting activities for food. In the place of cotton fields appeared large factories that perpetuated some of the worst excesses of Jim Crow labor exploitation. The drive to cut labor costs to the bone and make assembly-line production as efficient as possible shaped the wages and working conditions of women in the poultry and catfish processing industries. For example, in the s in the Mississippi Delta, more than nine out of every ten of six thousand catfish processing and packaging employees were black women; many received less than five dollars an hour for their labor. At Delta Pride, the region’s and the nation’s largest producer, operatives struggled to keep up with a pace that demanded they cut off sixty catfish heads a minute (or as many as forty-three thousand a day). In an interview in , Rose Ross, who had worked for Delta Pride for six years, told how she contracted carpal tunnel syndrome from ripping and gutting thirty-three fish a minute and almost two thousand fish an hour. When she could not meet this pace, she was fired. She said, “They didn’t give me no workers compensation or nothing. They told me I was terminated because I couldn’t do the job for Delta Pride. Then . Sarah Anderson and Karen Harris, “After NAFTA: As Factories Flee to Mexico, the Trade Agreement Takes a Heavy Toll on the Rural South,” Southern Exposure  (fall ): –; Joe Drape, “Through the Mill,” Southern Exposure  (fall ): –. . Women of the Rural South: Economic Status and Prospects (Lexington: Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, ), , .

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they walked me to the gate. They just showed me the door and told me to get stepping.” Child labor persisted in parts of the South. Salvadoran immigrant girls packed eggs in North Carolina, while children as young as five toiled in Dallas garment sweatshops. In the s, Louisiana ranked first in the South in percentage of sixteen to nineteen year olds killed on the job (coming in third nationally, behind Utah and Oklahoma). Many states lacked effective enforcement mechanisms, and even when employers were fined, penalties were light. Violators of South Carolina labor laws, for example, were assessed fifty dollars per infraction. In Congress, southern representatives and senators remained beholden to donations from retailers, agribusinesses, and restaurant owners who had a vested interest in keeping children in the workplace. In addition, mirroring national trends, increasing numbers of poor southern women were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail for long periods of time as a result of drug offenses. (Between  and , the number of women incarcerated in all state and federal prisons jumped by  percent.) Among them was Kemba Smith, a twenty-three-year-old Richmond women who, in , was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison because of her association with a drug-dealing boyfriend. In , of all female state prisoners, almost one-half were in the South. In , Texas’s rate was highest—  women locked up for every , in the population. The growing prison population has profound economic consequences for southern families. In Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Virginia, at least  percent of all black men have been convicted of a felony (the figure is at least  percent for the black men in Georgia and Tennessee). In black ghettoes like Sunnyside in Houston and Frenchtown in Tallahassee, the absence of fathers, husbands, and sons severely undermines the well-being of large numbers of families. Incarcerated men and women alike now form an ever growing pool of forced labor producing a variety of goods and services and exploited by brand-name corporations.

. “Fishy Business,” Southern Exposure  (fall ): ; Eric Bates, “The Kill Line,” Southern Exposure  (fall ): ; James S. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. . Nixon, “Working in Harm’s Way,” –. . Murphy Davis, “Prison Slavery,” Southern Changes (fall ): ; Sarah Torian, “Criminalization of Women,” Southern Changes (fall ): –. . Ellis Cose, “The Prison Paradox,” Newsweek (November , ): –.

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The casinos that dot the shore of the Gulf Coast and the banks of the Mississippi River suggest the paradox of late-twentieth-century prosperity, southern-style. On the one hand, these enterprises have brought full-time employment to regions devastated by the decline of agriculture and the proliferation of shuttered manufacturing concerns. Further, they offer women and men customers alike an escape from the drab routine of the everyday work world into a place of bright lights, brand-name entertainment, and a certain degree of pleasure and excitement (depending upon one’s finances and temperament). On the other hand, casinos represent a peculiarly dramatic form of regressive taxation. They suck cash from the people who can least afford to part with it and offer in return only low-wage jobs that might or might not carry with them standard benefits like health care and medical insurance. Before its termination in , the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program revealed old patterns of discrimination in jobs and education in the South. In , black people represented . percent of recipients of AFDC in Alabama, where the average family received $. a month in payments. (Blacks were  percent of recipients in Arkansas [$. a month],  percent in Florida [$.],  percent in Georgia [$],  percent in Louisiana [$],  percent in Mississippi [$],  percent in North Carolina [$],  percent in South Carolina [$],  percent in Tennessee [$],  percent in Texas [$], and  percent in Virginia [$].) The South as a whole continued to be burdened by stubbornly high poverty rates, and average hourly wages in those states remained the lowest in the nation. Southern women who worked full-time earned pay lower than those in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southwest. In the early s, the average southern white household earned $, per year, while the comparable figures for blacks and Hispanics were $, and $,, respectively. These differentials varied little from the figures for . On the other hand, they also reflected a national trend in terms of disparities among the three groups. The South was not unique in its hierarchy of ethnic-income differences. . Characteristics and Financial Circumstances of AFDC Recipients, FY , Aid to Families with Dependent Children (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), table ; Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement,  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), . . Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America, – (Ithaca: ILR Press of Cornell University, ), –; Opdycke, “Recent Trends,” ; Cynthia M. Taeuber, comp., Statistical Handbook on Women in America (Phoenix: Oryx Press, ), , , . . “Bringin’ Home the Bacon,” Southern Exposure  (fall–winter ): .

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At the end of the twentieth century, the South was becoming increasingly ethnically diverse. Texas and Florida were among the states with the greatest percentage of foreign-born residents. Infusing energy and enterprise into the southern economy were Indian motel owners and Lebanese shopkeepers in Mississippi; Vietnamese fishermen in Louisiana and Vietnamese social workers in Georgia; Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Honduran workers of various kinds in Texas; and Asian high-tech professionals in the North Carolina Research Triangle (of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill). Of her hometown of Atlanta, Rebecca McCarthy (a journalist with the Atlanta Journal and Constitution) noted a marked change in the early s: “The city that didn’t have a pizza parlor until  now boasts a Korean Chamber of Commerce, a Hmong church, a Hispanic yellow pages, many Catholic masses in Spanish, a Russian Pentecostal congregation, a Korean radio station, a Hispanic weekly newspaper, a Chinese community center, and Baptist churches for everyone from Romanians to Haitians.” Between  and , the rate of increase among Asian immigrants ranged from a low of  percent in West Virginia to more than  percent in Georgia. About  percent of all new immigrants live in either Texas or Florida. In the early s, as many as  percent of all southerners spoke a language other than English at home. Again reflecting national trends, union membership in the South (never very high to begin with) declined precipitously during the last two decades of the twentieth century. In West Virginia, the most unionized of southern states, fully one-quarter of its workforce belonged to a union in ; fourteen years later, that figure was down to . percent. At the other end of the spectrum was North Carolina, with only . percent of its workforce unionized in , and less than  percent by the late s. Meanwhile, some local workforces continued to press for union recognition. At the same time, southern women have joined in a relatively recent national organizing drive called the Living Wage Campaign. Based in cities, this effort focuses on increasing the wages of employees of businesses that receive contracts from municipalities and other local governments. Durham, North Carolina, is among the cities to have enacted Living Wage laws, and similar legislation has been proposed, among other cities, in New Orleans and Knoxville. . McCarthy quoted in Eric Bates, “Beyond Black and White,” Southern Exposure  (fall ): , –; Somini Sengupta, “Delta Chinese Hang On to Vanishing Way of Life,” New York Times, November , , A. . Statistical Abstract, .

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Patterns of southern women’s work changed markedly in the second half of the twentieth century, as the old system of staple-crop agriculture gradually disappeared, and women moved into jobs similar to those of their counterparts in other areas of the country. However, persistent differentials in black and white women’s work testified to the dual legacy of hierarchical racial and gender ideologies. In the late s,  percent of southern white women held white-collar jobs as managers, professionals, technicians, and sales workers, but only one-quarter of all black women employees fell into that category. Less than one-third of white women, but more than half of all black women, labored in blue-collar jobs, as service, low-skilled, semiskilled, and skilled operatives. Sizable proportions of both groups of women (about one-quarter of white women and one-fifth of black women) remained in pink-collar jobs, defined as office and clerical employment. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of black men (. percent) held low-wage bluecollar jobs (compared to about half of all white men) suggested that African American families would continue to lag behind white families in terms of income, health care, and general economic well-being.

Spheres of Power and Influence Shaping Women’s Economic Condition Long-range patterns of women’s work do not necessarily reveal the full dimensions of power relations among various groups within twentieth-century southern society. Those relations span a spectrum of institutions and forms of resistance to authority. At one end of the spectrum we can identify the power of the state—either federal, state, or local policies and personalities— and at the other end the efforts of individual women to gain control over their own productive energies. Underlying this discussion is the fact that the many aspects of southern women’s economic activity—including domestic work and child rearing, neighborly cooperation, and participation in the paid labor force—reveal lost productivity due to ill health and to pervasive forms of discrimination against different groups of women. Although the South as a whole has a reputation for resisting the incursion of federal authority and federal programs of all kinds, twentieth-century southern women demonstrated a willingness and even eagerness to take advantage of social-welfare legislation and other forms of aid emanating from . Robert Pollin, “Living Wage, Live Action,” Nation (November , ): . . Eckman and Green with Braash and Shulman, “Job Equity,” .

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Washington. The peonage files of the United States Department of Justice are replete with cases of mothers and wives who sought help from federal officials in locating and freeing their loved ones from forced labor. During World War I, southern women in general benefited from the War Risk Insurance Act that provided them with direct cash stipends, and hence some independence in managing household finances, while their husbands were at war. (This program too, however, was marred by the discriminatory policies of local officials, who believed that black women as wage earners could not really be classified as “dependents” of their husbands.) As we have seen, during the Great Depression, women attempted to take advantage of public works projects, and accepted AFDC as their due. Textile mill workers appealed to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a variety of New Deal administrators, to halt stretch-outs and other kinds of speedups that put employees at risk. Like their menfolk, southern women showed no hesitation in seeking jobs in the national defense plants and other workplaces that relied upon government contracts. African American women welcomed federal intervention and legislation that destroyed the legal foundations of Jim Crow. Like women in other parts of the country, southern women took advantage of CETA jobs in the s. Blue-collar workers pressed government agencies to enforce health and safety measures in textile mills and coal mines, and looked to the National Labor Relations Board to certify union elections. Contrary to the myth of southern militant independence, then, southern women in specific instances have embraced federal authority when that authority provided compensation or protection to them in their roles as mothers and as workers. This is not to suggest that federal power has been uniformly benign in shaping labor relations in the South. To the contrary, for much of the century the federal government deferred to local and state prerogatives in regulating the workplace—in determining which groups could aspire to which jobs, how much they would be paid, and the conditions under which they would toil. By the late twentieth century, it was clear that free-trade policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement would have an adverse impact upon southern women working in any number of industries, from catfish processing to textiles. The federal government oversaw the guest-worker program that provided southern truck-farm owners with cheap workers from abroad. The lack of a national medical insurance program meant that many of the working poor would continue to be vulnerable to chronic health problems, . K. Walter Hickel, “War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Sevicemen’s Dependents in the South, –,” Journal of American History (spring ): –.

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and to interruptions in employment caused by their own illness or the illness of a loved one. Historically, poor people have suffered from ill health to a greater extent than their well-to-do counterparts; countless southern workers have suffered from tuberculosis, silicosis, hookworm, and hypertension. At home and in the workplace, it is poor folk, and not the middle class, who have been exposed to toxic chemicals in the air they breathe and the water they drink. In sum, by deferring to local communities in the area of health, education, and welfare, the federal government has proved complicit in maintaining long-standing social and economic inequalities. In a society that historically granted the full measure of privileges and rights to white men of property, the vast majority of twentieth-century southern women remained relegated to the lowest rungs of the employment ladder, and many remained at least partially dependent on fathers and husbands for their well-being. At the same time, women have demonstrated great resourcefulness in challenging hierarchies of formal power, at times in surreptitious ways. During labor unrest in , women workers in the Tampa cigar industry attempted both to exploit and to subvert conventional notions of compliant womanhood. An employer cited a group of Latinas, whom he described as “a disorderly mob of strikers”: they “rushed into the factory deriding and hooting workers . . . women, leading the mob, called the men at work ‘females’ and offered their skirts to those who refused to quit.” The Elizabethton strike of  was notable for the way some single women workers manipulated symbols of femininity to further their interest on the picket line and later in the courtroom, on the witness stand. With their bold ways of dressing and acting, they undermined the conventional view of women as passive and meek creatures. African American women perfected their own strategies of resisting the demands made upon them by landlords and employers. They engaged in absenteeism, collective slowdowns, and sabotage, and they put the needs of their families above the discipline imposed by the workplace. At the turn of the century, many urban domestics chose to “live out” in an effort to reclaim time for themselves and thereby escape the round-the-clock routine that was part and parcel of the servant’s lot. As a group, black women domestics relied on each other for information about prospective employers. During the . See, for example, “Sick for Justice: Health Care and Unhealthy Conditions,” a special issue of Southern Exposure  (summer ). . Nancy Hewitt, “In Pursuit of Power,” in Visible Women: New Essays in American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), .

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s, these informal networks became so pervasive and influential that white women believed (mistakenly) that they represented formal organizations (supposedly “Eleanor clubs,” named after the busybody of a first lady). In their off-work hours, in the evening, at “jook joints” and dance halls, and on Sunday morning at church, these women defined themselves in a way that was at odds with the image of the subservient worker so favored by whites of all classes. When “performances” of defiance spilled out into the public realm, they could have explosive consequences, as when a Montgomery seamstress (and NAACP activist) named Rosa Parks refused to yield her bus seat to a white man in . Of necessity, this discussion of southern women’s economic activity has ranged widely over many themes. The processes by which goods are produced and distributed lie at the heart of any society, and those processes reveal fundamental (if at times competing) values related to justice, fair play, and the relative worth of various kinds of productive labor. The southern economy, then, is best understood as a specific political economy, one that encompasses many spheres of human endeavor, and human longing. How then to predict women’s economic activity in the twenty-first century? Specific predictions would be risky, of course; much depends on the configuration of the national political landscape, on the health of the overall American economy, and on military and economic developments abroad. However, on the basis of our understanding of women’s roles through the past century, it is possible to hazard some educated projections about the future. First, we shall continue to see persistent differentials in the economic standing of women depending on whether they live in rural or urban areas, are immigrants or native-born, identify themselves as whites or blacks, and possess more or less formal education. It is doubtful that generations-old regional differences will disappear anytime soon—for example, that the women in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, or poor neighborhoods of Atlanta will overcome their historic liabilities in the workplace. Second, formal education and vocational training will persist as the most significant factor affecting women’s economic well-being. Education is the great leveler—the Ivy League–educated African American woman lawyer will by definition have more, and more lucrative, job opportunities compared to a white woman with (at least significantly inferior) credentials. This is not to suggest that employers’ prejudices, racial and otherwise, will dissipate. However, the high-tech information-management economy puts a premium on talent in a way the old agricultural economy did not. Third, in the absence of dramatic transformations in the workplace, southern women (like American women everywhere) will continue to struggle to

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balance paid labor outside the home with unpaid labor in it. Certain individual, progressive companies have introduced flexible work hours, accommodating women who want to work full-time, and offering on-site day care for the children of employees. Yet these advances continue to be piecemeal. In the absence of major state or federal initiatives in these areas, the vast majority of women will be forced to cope with the historic “double duty” that has burdened women for generations. Fourth, the developing global economy will continue to place intense pressure on southern women workers, as their employers exhort them to eschew unionization and other forms of collective action that would result in higher wages and better working conditions. Ever on the lookout for cheap sources of labor, national and transnational corporations have little compunction about abandoning a plant, or a town, in order to seek the ideal, ever elusive, compliant worker. These considerations, along with technological innovation in the workplace, will continue to render the jobs of most women insecure, whether those women work in manufacturing or in the clerical or service sectors. Finally, southern women’s economic activity will be shaped by two seemingly contradictory forces: a lessening of historic regional distinctiveness, on the one hand, and the heightened significance of place, on the other. The global economy tends to flatten historical differences among regions; in an effort to maintain their competitiveness, employers have little patience with local mores or customs. Yet women’s well-being will remain contingent upon where they live—whether their children have access to good schools, whether they live in a crime-free neighborhood, whether their home is close to a toxic dump or a polluted river. The key to all of these indicators is the nature of a woman’s paid employment, for her job more often than not determines the extent of her health insurance and the size of her mortgage or monthly rent—in other words, the quality of life for herself and her family. Finally, we return to the Memphis Furniture strikers of , and note the complexity of their story, especially the difficulty of detaching the nature of their paid employment from either long-standing historical realities or a web of contemporary family and community institutions. The subject of women’s economic activity provides a lens through which we might view the fullness of an entire society, and therefore rightly serves as an introduction to the larger study of southern women in the twentieth century and beyond.

s Stealth in the Political Arsenal of Southern Women     

arah ilkerson-reeman

O

ver the past one hundred years, perhaps the most dramatic change in U.S. politics is the remarkable transformation of the southern wing of the Democratic Party. The old party of white supremacy and disfranchisement has been reformed, or “remastered,” and emerged as a pro–civil rights, prodemocracy, antidiscrimination, cross-class interracial coalition. This political transformation resulted from hard-fought battles to expand the electorate; to empower marginalized and economically disadvantaged groups, specifically women, blacks, labor, children, and the poor; and to establish a government that more truly served the interests of all citizens, especially in the benighted South. When I was asked to share some insights regarding southern women’s political history over the past one hundred years, it seemed appropriate to focus on the roles southern women, “black” and “white,” have played in redefining the Democratic Party, for their influence has been enormous though hardly recognized. A close examination of the evidence reveals an extraordinary story, an incremental but steady movement on the part of southern women, individually and in organized groups, to “liberalize” and “feminize” a political institution that once stood for bigotry, prejudice, white male privilege, and states’ rights. The women’s movement to transform what once was the ruling party in the South started in the s and continues in the new millennium. This transformation also shaped the Republican Party as conservative white southerners, men and women, fled the reconstructed and feminized Democratic Party and made their home in the GOP whose leader

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ship is now dominated by southern “conservative” (reactionary) white men. Examining southern women’s political activism over the past one hundred years helps explain the current deep political divisions in the United States. Ideological elements rooted in southern liberalism, represented by the Democratic Party, and traditional southern “conservatism,” represented by the leadership of the Republican Party, today battle for supremacy at the national political level. The importance of this ideological warfare is evidenced in the divisions that characterized the  presidential “election,” a term that must be placed in quotes considering the problems with disfranchisement in Florida and the Supreme Court’s unprecedented and partisan intervention. Why is it that we still know so little about the roles of southern women and regional gender politics in this transformation? One answer is that old-fashioned chauvinism has been and remains entrenched within political historical analysis. Women’s political work is still treated as supportive and secondary to political work performed by men. Frequently, women’s particular contributions have been ignored, and their work as organizers, intraparty pressure groups, and gadflies has been treated as behind the scenes and indistinct from general party activities. Pride has also played a role. Conservative southern politicians tend to resent pressure from women’s groups, especially if women succeed in forcing an issue, and hesitate to admit defeat at the hands of women. This failure to credit women for their political achievements helps keep women’s political influence off the radar screens. Ignorance of southern women’s political history also reflects a widespread misconception that because a woman’s bloc did not emerge after the passage of the  woman suffrage amendment, and because women voted along the same class and ethnic lines as men, women made no difference in politics. The appearance of a solidly Democratic South before and long after  also moved some historians to jump to the conclusion that in southern politics, especially, women’s influence was insignificant. Rather than exploring . I would like to thank Jane Sherron De Hart, Pamela Tyler, the anonymous readers, and the audience and participants of the Converse College conference for their generous attention, insights, and suggestions that helped shape this essay. For more on voter realignment and the transformation of the Democratic Party, see Paul Kleppner, Who Voted: The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, – (New York: Praeger, ); Kristi Anderson, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); and Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ).

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arah ilkerson-reeman

how strict voting requirements and intimidation disfranchised southern women, white and black, political scientists assumed that women in the region were especially “apathetic” about politics. Chauvinism, neglect, and ignorance continue to impede our understanding of southern women’s political influence, particularly their part as catalysts in party transformation and voter realignment. The old assumption that women’s entrance into the electorate made no difference continues to influence the study of women’s political history. With the advent of feminist movements in the s, some scholars questioned why changes in women’s rights and status had not come more quickly after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Many blamed previous generations of women’s rights activists themselves for failing to bring about an egalitarian revolution. This judgment is tantamount to blaming a fairly puny boxer for failing to defeat a much larger, stronger opponent who also has the power to dictate (and change) the rules. Few gave the opponents of women’s rights due credit for the progress, and instead cited class-based complicity, elitism, and prejudice on the part of female activists as the sources of feminism’s failure. Southern white leaders of the movements, especially, have been painted as naive and racist middle-class white women motivated by desires for social control, incapable of developing effective cross-class and crossrace alliances that, hypothetically, would have strengthened their forces and causes. Such ahistorical criticisms seem highly questionable and peculiarly insensitive to the difficulties and dangers that black and white women faced in their efforts to wrestle power from southern white men. Different political systems and hazards require different strategies, and dangerous and subversive political activity requires discretion. Often southern women masked and coded their efforts to influence politics and conditions in the public realm. Southern women’s history remains clouded in obscurity in part because . In , Aileen Kraditor published Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (New York: Columbia University Press) in which she argues that movement leaders in the South were motivated primarily by their desires to keep blacks oppressed. Although Kraditor’s thesis has been debunked by more recent work on the subject, this stereotype persists, and regional chauvinism continues to impede the study of southern women’s political history. Anne Firor Scott’s research reveals the feminist agendas and goals of southern white female Progressive Era reformers and exposes the flaws in Kraditor’s thesis. She directly addresses this difference, albeit in a footnote (Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, – [; reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ], ix, –, –, ).

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women deliberately hid and disguised their most subversive political activity in order to fool, disarm, and outmaneuver their opponents. In the southern woman’s arsenal of political tactics, stealth was a critical feature. Women’s ability to leverage power was severely limited by social and cultural norms and legal and political structures designed to advantage men. As well, a great deal of southern women’s organizing and ideological transformations occurred in an interior world in which women’s personal relationships with each other informed, shaped, and strengthened their political labors. The challenge for scholars is to recognize political action that is not based on male models of political power, options, styles, and strategies. Likewise, it is essential to extend the definition of political activism to encompass strategies deployed on southern terrain that may not have been as necessary or effective in the North. Some of the most defining characteristics in southern history and political cultures, many scholars agree, are the extraordinarily high degrees of oppression and repression. Southern civility and chivalry have been (and are) tightly wound in the promise of violence, vengeance, or war. Some scholars see distinctly American versions of fascism, feudalism, and “Prussianism” deeply rooted in Dixieland. Racism is but one of many antidemocratic “isms” that have historically found sanctuary, birth, and rebirth in southern spaces. Yet, also born and bred in the Southland have been individuals who stood up to prejudice, discrimination, intolerance, injustice, and exploitation. A number of those who dared challenge corporate abuse, mob rule, and corrupt courthouse gangs, and determinedly advanced democratic principles, have been black and white women. For small-d democratic southern female activists, their work in the political arena took the form of open combat and guerrilla warfare. Battles to improve the quality of life for children and to secure the basic rights and protections of citizenship for women, people of color, the poor, and working classes, and a host of other liberal causes, were waged in a largely hostile environment. It is important to break the paradigm that treats separately white and black women’s history, and, instead, begin to see the parallel, cumulative, and sometimes tandem influence of southern black and white women on parties, public policies, legislation, and government. Racially segregating the histories of southern women’s political activism has the effect of obscuring the relationship between women’s rights and modern civil rights movements, and subsequently obscures the accomplishments of southern black and white women working as tandem forces in the political realm. Pulling back the camera, to take in one hundred years of women’s political history within a geographic region, brings into view a landscape of black, white, and mixed-race

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communities, political agents, and institutions. It illuminates the barriers and tensions between various constituent groups as well as the compromises and unresolved issues. Long-term effects of constant and sporadic struggle become more pronounced and discernable. Throughout the century, southern women waged their political battles on four primary fronts: education, public health and welfare, civil rights (including voting rights), and gender equity. In time, a fifth front coalesced to ward off aggressive reactionary elements dedicated to dismantling and undermining advances on the four reform fronts. These reactionary elements, or southern white preservationist movements, increasingly attracted southern white women whose reactionary antireform work constituted a sixth front of southern women’s political activism. These women were instrumental in the emergence of modern right-wing southern Republicans whose political heritage lies with the Dixiecrats, anti–civil rights southern Democrats who, after walking out of the party’s  national convention and failing to establish viable ultraconservative third parties, eventually took control of the modern Republican Party. What follows is a chronological overview of how this ideological and political dynamic developed, emphasizing the central roles of southern women and the process of their politicization that also transformed U.S. politics. Because the development of these “fronts” is rooted in the southern agrarian reform fervor of the s, this essay begins with that critical historical moment. The first section examines the gender politics of the – period. In this generation, economic uncertainty, class-based unrest, and agrarian reform movements politicized southern women even as thousands of white and black southern men lost their hard-won access to the ballot box through white supremacy and disfranchisement campaigns that placed “conservative” Democrats firmly in control. This period of declension inspired southern black and white women to develop gender-based, cause-oriented organizations. The second part focuses on the – period as southern women used their organizations, expanded their coalitions, and pursued progressive and political reforms, such as woman suffrage, in spite of the fact that they did not have the right to vote. The last section examines the post- period in which southern women used their political bases, developed in . Historian A. Elizabeth Taylor inaugurated what became a series of articles on the woman suffrage movements in southern states, beginning with an article on Arkansas published in . For a complete list of the articles, see Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, ),  n. .

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earlier eras, and new voting power to implement reforms they had sought for decades. In the process, they altered the partisan political infrastructure, especially their place and influence within the southern wing of the Democratic Party. As women demonstrated their political efficacy, the two major parties responded to, and took advantage of, women’s increasing influence. The terms liberal and conservative are, of course, extremely complex and relative. In the turn-of-the-century South, to stand for equal rights and protection under the law for all citizens was not liberal or conservative, but “radical.” Belief in such democratic principles was less exceptional among African Americans who were systematically denied their constitutional rights and protections, particularly by white men whom the system advantaged. In the South, white male privilege and prerogative, or affirmative action for white men, was simply the status quo, the way of life to be conserved. The concentration of political power in the hands of a few wealthy white men encouraged the exploitation not only of people of color but of white women and children as well. The New South agricultural economy, dependent on railroad companies, cash crops, and credit, also made it extremely difficult for many white men, yeoman farmers especially, to secure a decent living in return for their families’ labors and production. Public resources and government power were used to enhance the status of an already privileged class of white planters and industrial capitalists, the southern version of the new corporate order. But state administrations did little to serve the interests of small farmers. In the early s, economic conditions reached such a critical point in the region that farm families and communities challenged the ruling conservative Democratic elite. In an effort to address the problems of modern farm life, amid the increasingly global and industrialized economy, two powerful grassroots movements, temperance and agrarian reform, swept the South simultaneously, and women played central roles in both. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an all-female organization devoted to restricting the availability and use of liquor, gained a stronghold in several southern states after the national leader Frances Willard barnstormed through the region. Willard, as the former president of North Western Female College in Evanston, Illinois, fought tenaciously to retain women’s influence and authority in the administration of the college after Northwestern University acquired the institution. She lost that battle but gained a reputation as an activist committed to improving women’s rights and powers of self-determination. Willard also supported woman suffrage, and under her leadership, symbolized by her “Do Everything” policy, local WCTU chapters devoted themselves to social and political issues beyond

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temperance. She and the women-only WCTU chapters opened the doors of political activism to thousands of southern women who agitated for a host of causes intended to improve the treatment and status of women and children. In a society that accepted the beating of wives and children as a matter of male prerogative, Willard’s stand against drunkenness and its destructive results, especially economic disaster and domestic violence, galvanized thousands of women who hoped to preempt misery and abuse through the power of law. Black and white women established WCTU chapters throughout the South, and temperance activists scored victories through state legislation and local option laws. These local campaigns brought politics right to the hearthside, and exchanges between temperance women and their opponents, male and female, often grew hostile. When a Texas newspaper editor suggested that the WCTU should “tackle” a female reporter who opposed local option, one WCTU member responded that “the best thing to tackle any woman who advocates the whiskey traffic is a drunken husband.” The reformist zeal that moved temperance women to engage in such public sparring was also expressed in their support of third parties, particularly the Prohibitionist Party. Belle Kearney, a Willard-inspired WCTU leader in Mississippi, recalled “stirring arguments” with her brothers over Kearney’s affiliation with the Prohibition Party whose platform also endorsed woman suffrage. “You are the only one of a vast relationship who has gone over to a new political faith,” Kearney’s brothers argued. “If you and the women associated with you, continue the agitation that has begun you will eventually break up the Democratic party.” None of the parties realized at the time that Kearney and her allies represented the future of the Democratic Party. She, with the support of women’s reform organizations, would be among the first women elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in the s. One reason for the men’s great concern was that other competing reformcentered political factions, especially various “Fusion” alliances involving discontented farmers, had begun to control the balance of political power and hand conservative southern Democrats some stinging and costly defeats. In . See Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, –  (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ); Wheeler, New Women of the New South. . James D. Ivy, “‘The Lone Star State Surrenders to a Lone Woman’: Frances Willard’s Forgotten  Texas Temperance Tour,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly  (July ): . . Ibid., n. , quoting Kearney, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (New York: Abbey Press, ), –.

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Virginia, white yeoman Readjusters sided with Republicans to unseat Bourbon Democrats. Once in power, they nullified the poll tax. The rise of the Grange and the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (SFA) in the late s and s represented a similar threat to southern conservative Democratic control. These agrarian-based organizations focused on the economic plight of farm families, and promoted self-help initiatives, such as cooperatives (to cut out the middleman) and public high schools and colleges to serve rural populations. Because women were central to farm production, both organizations attracted large numbers of women into local chapters and suballiances. Neither organization was a political party; therefore, women’s heavy involvement and leadership, especially among female members, were not taboo. Interest in woman suffrage was common among women in agrarian reform movements because many firmly believed that too few politicians and government officials served the interests of farm families. By the early s, it was not unusual for southern white women to be active in both the WCTU and the Grange, and the organizations used this overlapping membership to build effective coalitions and strengthen support for their reforms. These movements propelled women into political leadership and created institutions that enabled women’s rights advocates and feminists to establish a beachhead in the South and to pressure the Democratic Party to embrace Progressive Era reforms. Events in Mississippi illustrate the point. Through fraud, violence, and intimidation, Mississippi’s white Democrats forced the Republicans from office in . Once in power, the Democrats dramatically cut property taxes and the “teachers’ tax” used to support public schools. Many of Mississippi’s white hill farmers, who joined the Grange to improve their economic circumstances, detested the elitism of the University of Mississippi that was dominated by the rich white sons of the Delta. In , against great resistance from “Ole Miss” supporters, the Grange succeeded in passing legislation to establish a separate land-grant college for white men, the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Starkville, now Mississippi State University. The establishment of a second state college for white men strengthened the movement for a publicly funded college for Mississippi’s white women. Female leaders in the WCTU, the Mississippi Grange, and the Mississippi Teachers’ Association became vocal advocates for the establishment of the women’s . Donald B. Marti, Women of the Grange (New York: Greenwood Press, ), – ; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance: A Reconsideration of the Role and Status of Women in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South,” Feminist Studies  (fall ): –.

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college and lobbied loudly and continually for the cause. In , the “Fusion” Party, composed of Grange leaders and Republicans, included in their platform a plank favoring the establishment of a state college for white girls. The state Democratic convention countered by co-opting the issue and passing a resolution encouraging the legislature to support the cause. In , Mississippi’s legislators debated a bill to create a white women’s college. The state’s African Americans could attend coed state-supported institutions of higher education established during Reconstruction. Mississippi’s white young women were the only group with no publicly funded state college available to them. Such an institution could help Mississippi’s white daughters become less financially dependent on their fathers who were themselves at the mercy of an unstable cotton market. While female advocates insisted that establishing such a college was only fair and right, the legislators’ primary rationale for backing the cause (for which they had little enthusiasm) was not to liberate women, nor provide equitable services, but to liberate men from dependent women. The passage of the bill and the establishment of the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls (II and C), now the Mississippi University for Women, was an important moment in the history of women’s higher education. Because northern land-grant colleges were coed, a step southern politicians resisted, the II and C had the distinction of being the first state-supported women’s college in the country. Soon other southern states, where the Grange and, later, the Farmers’ Alliance wielded political influence, followed Mississippi’s lead and founded similar institutions. The overwhelmingly female membership of the North Carolina Teachers Association (NCTA) and the president of the National Farmers’ Alliance, Marion Butler, a state senator and NCTA member, worked together to establish the Normal and Industrial College for Women in Greensboro. The public colleges for white women in Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and North Carolina, all established . D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, – (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –; Bridget Smith Pieschel and Stephen Robert Pieschel, Loyal Daughters: One Hundred Years at Mississippi University for Women, –  (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), ; Marti, Women of the Grange, ; “Exhibit of the Deposition of Mrs. [Annie C.] Peyton, September , ,” Mississippi House Journal (): –; Journal of the Senate of the State of Mississippi at a Regular Session, January , , Jackson, Mississippi, , . . Suzanne Lebsock, “Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women,” Journal of Southern History (May ): –. . Pieschel and Pieschel, Loyal Daughters, .

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with Grange, Southern Farmers’ Alliance, and Populist support, played critical roles in politicizing and improving the status and economic options of white women in the South. In part because of the association with insurgent movements, support for these institutions shifted with the political winds. Legislative debates over funding, salaries, hiring, curriculum, and the inclusion of women on boards of trustees and in college administrations forced female education activists and male politicians to deal with issues of gender discrimination in uncompromisingly political forums. A socialistic element to the structure of some of the colleges, most noticeable in Mississippi’s unprecedented experiment, and the efforts of women to exercise power within and over the state institutions, disturbed many politicians. Indeed, highly educated and professionally ambitious women joined the taxpayer-supported faculties, and through their influence some departments became incubators for feminist and female-centered political activism. Faculty at state colleges for white women in Mississippi and North Carolina were especially instrumental in generating interest in feminist causes and providing leadership for equal pay and woman suffrage movements. As a matter of state-level governmental policy, female faculty at these institutions and their graduates who taught in elementary and secondary public schools were paid half the salaries that white male faculty received. In the s and ’s, white female teachers in Mississippi and North Carolina organized to pressure legislators for “equal pay for equal work,” but with little result. Thousands of young women who attended these colleges during highprofile battles for pay equity entered the ranks of public school teachers, and many earned less than illiterate white men working in the New South’s textile mills. Considering the origins of these colleges and the material circumstances of public school teachers, it is perhaps not surprising that female educators were concerned about the treatment of labor and the wholesale exploitation of families, especially women and children, who left failing farms . See Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, “From Clubs to Parties: North Carolina Women in the Advancement of the New Deal,” North Carolina Historical Review : (July ): –; Wilkerson-Freeman, “Pauline Van De Graaf Orr and Feminist Education in Mississippi, –,” in Mississippi Women: A Biographical Collection, ed. Martha Swain, Elizabeth Payne, and Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming); and Wilkerson-Freeman, “The Second Battle for Woman Suffrage: Alabama White Women, the Poll Tax, and Y. O. Key’s Master Narrative of Southern Politics,” Journal of Southern History  (May ): –. . Wilkerson-Freeman, “Pauline Van De Graaf Orr”; Wilkerson-Freeman, “Women and the Transformation of American Politics” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, ), –.

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to seek work in mill villages. Interest in economic discrimination and injustice became central components of southern women’s political cultures as the textile and tobacco industries and sharecropping and tenant farm systems expanded through the South and as underpaid female teachers tried to educate this population. In the insurgent climate of the late-nineteenth-century South, black southern women also engaged in militant agrarian reform activism. The southernbased Colored Farmers’ Alliance (CFA) depended to a great extent on the participation and support of the , female members within its total membership of . million. The CFA, which originated in Arkansas, sought economic justice for black sharecropping families and farm laborers by establishing cooperative warehouses and stores and challenging obstacles to black landownership. Black women and children picked cotton alongside men. Women were in the front lines when CFA cotton pickers revolted against the system of starvation wages and debt peonage. In , local CFA members launched a series of strikes in Mississippi, and the governor responded by sending three companies of National Guardsmen who brutally attacked and murdered black cotton pickers—men, women, and children as well as CFA leaders. In spite of this defeat, CFA cotton pickers elsewhere in the South continued to strike for higher wages and better hours, albeit with little success, and the organization’s political influence grew. Black CFA and white Farmers’ Alliance men had demonstrated their willingness to vote against conservative Democrats and to support Republicans and “Fusion” candidates. In , the CFA and the white SFA joined with labor activists to establish a third party, the Populist Party. Victories of the Farmers’ Alliance candidates over conservative Democrats fueled white planters’ determination to maintain control of farm labor. When black cotton pickers led by the CFA strikers from Memphis organized a strike in Lee County, Arkansas, in , black strikebreakers were brought in to defeat the movement. A bloody battle erupted in which black men, women, and children fought each other with farm implements, guns, and knives, and CFA strike leaders were hunted down and murdered. But such violence seemed only to solidify the interests of rural and town labor. In February , the Populist Party emerged as a third party representing the interests of the CFA, SFA, National Farmers’ Alliance, and the Knights of Labor. . Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, – (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –.

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This climate of racial violence, exacerbated by conservative Democrats’ fears of third-party–Republican “Fusion” control, moved some southern black women to take a stand against racial injustice. Some expressed their discontent by leaving the region and carrying with them a resolve to establish communities that did not replicate the abuses that they had experienced in the South. The “great migration” of African Americans strengthened black women’s reform movements in northern urban areas. After moving to the regional borderland of Washington, D.C., the black education leader Anna Julia Cooper of North Carolina wrote eloquently about the harmful nature of Jim Crow in her book, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, published in . She especially pricked the consciences of southern white women who, she insisted, were complicit in the mistreatment of black women at the hands of white men if they remained silent on the subject. Among the most daring acts of political defiance by a southern black woman were those performed by Ida B. Wells, a native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, who became a successful journalist in Memphis where she focused her energies on the concerns of the black community and civil rights. Wells defied racial discrimination when she refused to move to a Jim Crow car and successfully sued the railway company for damages resulting from her forced removal (although the decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court). In , in the midst of the agrarian revolts that challenged conservative white Democrats, Wells published an exposé of the lynching of several black grocers in Memphis who were perceived as threats to white economic supremacy. She openly condemned whites for perpetrating a dangerous myth: that all black men wanted to rape white women, a presumption used to justify the lynching of innocent black men. Angry whites responded by violently attacking her newspaper’s office while Wells was on a speaking tour in the North and threatened to kill her if she returned. She remained in exile outside the South, but used her notoriety to organize among women’s clubs to fight the practice of lynching. Wells also channeled her discontent into building a powerful national network, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), established in . She and another Memphis leader, Mary Church Terrell, whose father was a powerful and wealthy black Republican, played key roles in crafting this alliance of black women’s clubs that coordinated women’s benevolent and self-help initiatives in black communities. Through churches and private organizations, black women affiliated with the NACWC raised money and established schools, scholarship programs, health clinics, and orphanages. In Memphis, as historian Kathleen C. Berkeley discovered, the

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NACWC spanned class lines in a way that allowed black female domestics and light-skinned black women of more privileged classes to work together to improve conditions in their communities. While the rhetoric of the NACWC emphasized racial “uplift,” the organization also enabled black women to develop and pursue distinctly political agendas that challenged white supremacy. Southern black women most involved in the organization, especially Wells and Terrell, were instrumental in establishing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and attacking racial discrimination and civil rights violations through the courts. The highly defensive attitude of antilabor, antiblack, conservative–states’ rights southern Democrats hardened as Fusion forces scored victories and elected agrarian reformers and Republicans to high political office in the s. In North Carolina, a white Republican, Dan Russell, was elected governor, and conservative Democrats responded by organizing white supremacy campaigns to break the biracial coalitions. When a biracial “Fusion” ticket was elected in the thriving port city of Wilmington in , conservative white Democrats turned to violence in order to maintain political control. They charged that a local black editor had publicly insulted the integrity of pure southern white womanhood when he condemned the myth of the “black beast rapist” and implied that some white women were attracted to black men. Conservative Democrats used this as a provocation to unleash a race riot and prevent the newly elected city officials from taking office. White men were exhorted by leading conservative Democrats to demonstrate their Christian manhood and protect the purity of white women by violently attacking and killing blacks and other men who opposed conservative Democrats. A band of white supremacist Red Shirts, led by a future governor of North Carolina, Cameron Morrison, boarded a train and viciously beat Governor Russell, thereby demonstrating that not even white governors were safe from mob rule. Economic and class issues among and between white southerners were at the heart of this power struggle. White supremacy, for the sake of pure white womanhood, was a convenient tool, or cover, certainly a strategy, that a white political minority deployed to undermine political rivals, Republicans and Populists, who in fact enjoyed majority support in many sectors of the South. As white conservative Democrats succeeded in their campaigns of . Berkeley, “‘Colored Ladies Also Contributed’: Black Women’s Activities from Benevolence to Social Welfare, –,” in The Web of Southern Social Relation: Women, Family, and Education, ed. Walter J. Fraser Jr., R. Frank Sanders Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), –.

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violence and intimidation, they trumpeted their goal of removing the black man from politics. But their legislative deeds revealed a clear intention to diminish the political influence of white Populists. By passing laws that established strict registration, literacy, and poll tax requirements for voting, conservative legislators disfranchised poor farmers, black and white, and artificially secured Democratic Party dominance in the South. This artificial hold on power, dependent upon disfranchisement, made conservative southern Democrats, and politicians and local lawmen under their influence, exceedingly protective of their system of minority rule and suspicious of any change that could be construed as a challenge to their power. When the national leadership of the Democratic Party co-opted Populist issues by nominating William Jennings Bryan for president in , the subsequent fracturing of the Democrats and Populists gave the Republican candidate a victory. The Republican Party’s dominance at the federal level from  to  further induced southern Democrats to cling all the more tenaciously to control of state and local governments. It is difficult to determine how the demise of the Populists in the South affected the white women’s organizations associated with agrarian reform. Female-centric organizations, such as the WCTU and teachers’ associations, may have been somewhat protected from the ramifications of partisan warfare because women could not vote. Yet, in political and legislative battles of the late-nineteenth-century South, white women’s interest in a cause could improve the chances of sympathetic male leaders. One strategy southern Democrats used to retake political control involved co-opting issues dear to the hearts of female activists, especially public education and temperance. Advocates of disfranchisement, such as North Carolina governor Charles Aycock, waved the banner of improved public education in the South and thus ensured themselves the backing of most white female teachers and concerned mothers. Women’s activism on this front may have contributed to the Democrats’ decision in North Carolina to use school betterment as their cause célèbre in elections following the violent white supremacy campaigns. Without a doubt, co-optation of the public education issue strengthened the political base of conservative (white supremacist) Democrats who used the progressive reform rhetoric of “good government” and linked education and literacy to voting requirements, and cynically argued that such restrictions motivated men to learn to read. These politicians also cleverly linked poll tax revenues to funding for education, so to oppose the poll tax was, they argued, tantamount to opposing public education. This linkage had the regressive effect of ensuring that fewer poor men would vote and that public education would be sorely underfunded. The institution of the white Democratic

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primaries in the s further sealed the fate of African Americans in the South and biracial political coalitions. Ironically, the exit of black men from the southern political stage and the emergence of white supremacist candidates who ostensibly championed “progressive” social causes also encouraged white southern women to become more involved in government and politics. Like black women, southern white women organized clubs to improve health and education and establish charitable and philanthropic enterprises in their communities. Similar to black women’s clubs in their use of private subscriptions and funds, white women’s club work concentrated far less on “self-help” initiatives and more on pressuring Democratic legislators to use tax dollars to support a wide range of social services. Because southern state governments, with the exception of Tennessee, were ruled solidly by the Democratic Party after , white club women were forced to work through factions within the Democratic Party in order to implement reforms. But women operated from positions of weakness because by law not only could they not vote, but they could also not serve on juries, hold positions of public trust, or control their own wages and property. Husbands had legal custody of “their” children, a situation that discouraged many women from seeking divorces in spite of abuse. White women were also barred from entering many professions open to white and black men. Yet women were expected to pay taxes, bills, and so on with no discount afforded them on the basis of their limited means. In short, women earned woman-sized paychecks, but the same legal authority that denied them the basic right of economic selfdetermination also held them accountable for man-sized financial obligations. With the depressions of the s, more (so-called) middle-class southern white women learned that in spite of all the flowery, chivalrous rhetoric regarding their protection, their dependent status as women actually made them extremely vulnerable in times of economic uncertainty. Many, especially those with a relatively high level of education, began to question the wisdom of patriarchal control. This rumbling of feminist sentiment impressed Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman), a socialist feminist and author from the North who cultivated the growing interest among southern white women in feminist economic and political reform. Gilman toured the region in  and , and her message emphasized the wrongs that resulted from unquestioned and lawfortified male dominance. Abusive conditions demonstrated women’s need for economic and occupational self-determination. Her speaking engagements, sponsored by women’s clubs in Memphis, Atlanta, and several smaller towns, drew large and enthusiastic crowds of, mostly, white women. She also

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assisted already active southern women in organizing coalitions of women’s clubs into state and local chapters of the national General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) and inspired many women, such as the wife of North Carolina’s Republican governor, Dan Russell (the victim in the trainbeating incident), to embrace woman suffrage. But the issue of woman suffrage was strongly associated with northern reformers, such as Gilman whose aunt, the influential abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The most famous woman suffrage activists, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, were all Quaker abolitionists. Southern Democrats argued that woman suffrage was Yankee inspired and would only enhance the power of Republicans. Nonetheless, a growing number of southern white women spoke out for the cause and organized chapters of equal suffrage leagues. These reformers fought an uphill battle for suffrage reform that would never be embraced by conservative male politicians who depended on a very closed voting system for their control in the region. Indeed, white female activists had to be careful how they conducted their movements for civic and social reform, for male politicians were quick to accuse them of having designs on the ballot. Once disfranchisement was firmly in place, southern white feminists and suffragists became quite practiced in the strategic art of “dissemblance.” Black female activists who remained in the South after  also had to be extremely careful in their efforts to reform the inequitable economic and education systems of the South. In part because of the violent response of whites to black political power in the region, black women conducted much of their political activism through education and religious organizations. Under the cover of moral reclamation and assimilation, black Baptist women’s organizations in the South promoted political philosophies and strategies that resisted the lessons of inferiority that southern whites sought to impose upon African Americans. Individual women, such as Nannie Rice Burroughs, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, established educational institutions that fostered racial pride based on the understanding that blacks could achieve success in intellectual and academic studies. In the wake of the  Plessy decision, black education advocates continued to use strategic accommodationist self-help rhetoric even as they nurtured teachers and preachers who taught young African Americans to challenge racial injustice and discrimination. Many seemingly accommodationist religious and education leaders served as bridges between white civic leaders, male and female, . Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, – (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), .

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and African American institutions and communities. Respectability, an aggressive and unassailable form of strategic respectability developed by these women, was used to secure access to the political power of southern white women and men who, in time, embraced interracial activism. New generations of black and white southern women were inspired and politicized by the work of these activists who, by drawing attention to the grossly inadequate public funding of black education, unjustly limited options for African Americans, and lynching, condemned racism itself. For black and white southern women, this political activity set the stage for democratic movements of the twentieth century and beyond. Most important, the organization of black and white women’s clubs and the network of African American coed colleges and white state women’s colleges provided crucial sources of collective power that generated new women’s political cultures. In these volunteer organizations and colleges, southern women not only studied politics but also developed leadership skills. These institutions were the foundations and sustaining sanctuaries through which African American and women’s rights movements continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. By the turn of the century, politically engaged, though not yet enfranchised, southern black and white women entered an era of political development in which they would experiment with a host of styles, strategies, and techniques to exert their influence on government and politics. Many of the issues that inspired southern women to political activism in the s had not been resolved. Indeed, some problems, such as racial discrimination and the exploitation of women, children, and labor, had grown worse. As New South communities developed, women became increasingly concerned about the dangers drunken men and vices associated with the liquor trade, such as prostitution and gambling, posed to women and children. WCTU activists pursued increasingly feminist agendas, but promoted their causes and justified their militancy with the language and fire of evangelical Christianity. They emphasized moral reform and home protection in their holy war against “Demon Rum.” Even force and direct conflict with men were not beyond their capability, as “wet” male voters in Asheville, North Carolina, learned in  when bands of Sunday school children, organized by local women, harassed and humiliated them on their way to the polls during a local option election. Twenty years before this election melee, these same women had established a home for unwed mothers, former prostitutes, and their children to ameliorate the damaging effects of vice. The women’s turn to more aggressive and confrontational measures, ladylike versions of street warfare, signaled their frustrations with their lack of political self-determination

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and their dependence on male voters, who were plied with liquor by the opposition on election day. North Carolina’s passage of statewide prohibition, within a year of the infamous Asheville demonstration, further encouraged female activists and whetted their desires for political power. With the advent of state prohibition laws throughout the region, chapters of the WCTU focused their energies on the enforcement of prohibition. Some WCTU leaders, such as Belle Kearney, escalated their work for woman suffrage and expanded their activism into more secular realms of women’s organizational activities. White women’s clubs in general became proactive in rooting out government corruption; investigating conditions in jails, almshouses, and state-sponsored asylums; establishing social services for the destitute; and pursuing a host of other programs that they deemed to be positive uses of government resources and power. While some organizations, such as the WCTU, continued to emphasize evangelical religious mandates, other women’s organizations, especially those founded by Jewish women and with strong Jewish memberships, increasingly utilized the rhetoric of responsible citizenship and social justice to explain their activism. Both black and white women’s organizations in the South established institutions that reflected their great concern for the health and well-being of destitute women and children. Among their first efforts were juvenile reform schools that prevented at least a portion of child delinquents from being incarcerated with adults in local jails and chain gang stockades. As women pressured officials to expand public welfare initiatives, these institutions were absorbed into the network of tax-funded state government services. Although black women’s clubs labored to expand social services, white women could indulge in a level and type of aggressive political pressure that black women could not, at least not without great risk. As industrialism advanced in the early-twentieth-century South, women’s concerns over the treatment of children working in factories grew. White teachers, joined by mothers and concerned club women, organized to combat conditions that they believed threatened the health and welfare of women and children. In large forums, they openly indicted southern factory owners for their increased use of child labor. Female education activists who fought for compulsory public education laws could not avoid coming into conflict with powerful New South industrialists who considered school-age white children a crucial source of cheap labor. Neither could they avoid the realization that many children worked because their parents, especially their mothers, made so little money in the noisy, hot, lint-filled textile mills of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. A political dynamic emerged in which the relatively liberal activism of southern women inspired a defensive and

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aggressive conservative reaction from wealthy and powerful white men who controlled the party that ruled the South, the Democratic Party. As southern industrialists resisted state mandatory education laws, southern white women’s organizations pressed for federal child labor laws. But southern politicians reacted by accusing the women of advancing federal power over and against states’ rights, a path that could eventually imperil the southern states’ unconstitutionally restrictive political system. Indeed, these women saw little problem using federal power to oppose the unfettered economic exploitation of women and children if states would not. As they fought for social justice and fair treatment through state government, female activists encountered entrenched and increasingly fierce opposition, especially to federal laws that threatened to diminish the rights of property owners and advance the rights of labor. As southern white women became increasingly frustrated with the extraordinary resistance of southern politicians to national anti–child labor initiatives, their interest in being able to choose and elect their political representatives intensified. Their cause moved forward somewhat when Democratic president Woodrow Wilson underwent a conversion to “advanced progressivism” in  in order to appeal to female voters in the West and female social activists who had been in the forefront of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in . Wilson also softened his states’ rights–based resistance to woman suffrage. On the eve of World War I, southern white women had tired of demonstrating their interest in public affairs and begun to work aggressively to change the dominant political culture in the South by infusing it with their more female- and child-centric agendas. By , the unfair economic systems of the South had spawned huge impoverished underclasses across the racial spectrum. Clearly, the fundamental concerns of southern female activists had not been resolved by Progressive Era reforms. Quite the contrary, the systems had become all the more fixed as entrepreneurs, many representing northern investors drawn by promises of cheap and “docile” labor, low taxes, and protection against labor unions, established new industries and plantations in the South. World War I was a watershed in the history of southern women’s political activism. The enormous power of black and white women’s clubs turned to the war effort. The administration of President Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat, sought to co-opt the power of women’s organizations across the nation by establishing national and state Women’s Councils to coordi. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, –  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .

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nate Liberty Bond drives and other war-related programs. By , many of the white women who led the largest and most active southern women’s organizations were also vocal leaders in the woman suffrage movement. In several southern states, these women were responsible for promoting warbond campaigns, duties they combined with their suffrage work. These white women also worked closely with black club and church women and farm demonstration agents who sold Liberty Bonds to blacks on large plantation communities in the most isolated and rural reaches of the South. Because southern white women sold woman suffrage as part of their war effort, it is quite possible that black women peddled not only war bonds, but a desire for greater political agency as well. This desire is perhaps most evident in the numerous labor protests and strikes led by women of color in southern cities in the period of –. As race and class oppression deepened in the Jim Crow South, working-class minority women resisted by organizing secret societies and unions that opposed efforts to coerce workers into accepting unsatisfactory labor conditions. In , Cuban female cigar workers in Tampa launched a wildcat strike, a move that inspired many Latin workingmen in the community to engage in greater union activism. In , Chicana workers in El Paso also struck for fairer wages and treatment, displaying an invigorated sense of power in the wake of the war. Black women often “voted with their feet,” by leaving “cheap” employers and blacklisting abusive ones, and their efforts to control their own labor irked whites who considered such “impudence” a threat to white supremacy and their personal comfort. When southern legislatures and city governments cynically took advantage of the patriotic fervor that accompanied the U.S. entrance into the war and passed “work or fight” laws to force all black women to work, black women fought back. As city ordinances required black women, but not white women, to carry work verification cards, the laws clearly sought to control the labor and restrict the freedoms of black women. Rather than be forced into domestic servitude, two Atlanta women, Nellie Atkins and Ruth Warf, spent sixty days in prison (where they were put to work in the laundry). Such injustice invigorated NAACP chapters in . William J. Breen, “Southern Women in the War: The North Carolina Woman’s Committee, –,” North Carolina Historical Review : (): –. . Nancy A. Hewitt, “Politicizing Domesticity: Anglo, Black, and Latin Women in Tampa’s Progressive Movements,” in Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, ed. Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, ), –; Irene Ledesma, “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism, – ,” Western Historical Quarterly : (): –.

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the South. But for half a million southern blacks in the years between  and , the desire to seek a better life outside the South became overwhelming, and they took control of their labor and their lives by turning northward. In spite of constant intimidation and barriers to legal recourse, the tradition of agrarian resistance to starvation wages and planters who routinely cheated sharecroppers also remained strong. In , black men and women sharecroppers working on new plantations in Arkansas (funded by northern investors) joined the Progressive Farmers’ and Household Union to challenge the system that kept black farmers in the grip of debt peonage. Men and women paid their union dues, in some cases with Liberty Bonds, and hired a white Republican attorney to explore ways to ensure that white plantation owners would not cheat black farmers and force them to accept an unfair price for their cotton. After gunfire broke up a union meeting, rumors of a black insurrection circulated through Phillips County, and whites began hunting down, raping, and killing blacks. National Guard troops, sent by the governor to restore order, rounded up and incarcerated hundreds of black men, women, and children. No whites were arrested, even though untold numbers of blacks were murdered by roving bands of white men, some of whom traveled from neighboring states to kill blacks in Phillips County. News of the Arkansas massacre, or the “Elaine Riot” as it was later called, reached Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Chicago. Risking her life, Wells-Barnett returned to the South to investigate the incident. In Little Rock, black farm women spirited Wells-Barnett into the prison where their husbands and union leaders awaited execution. After returning to the North, Wells-Barnett wrote a devastating report detailing the economic motivations behind the farmers’ efforts to organize, and exposing the reason local whites attacked the farmers: profits. The Arkansas Riot, told from the perspective of black victims, garnered sympathy for the union leaders who had not received a fair trial. Black journalists forced public scrutiny of the failure of Arkansas officials to adhere to due process of law. Eventually, the sharecroppers’ sentences were commuted as the result of a United States Supreme Court ruling. The prodemocracy rhetoric used by federal agents to mobilize support for the war, and the government’s use of women’s organizations in the effort, also infused new life into the movement for woman suffrage in the South. Because disfranchisement was the key to the power of conservative southern . Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of  (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, ). . Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Riot (Chicago, ); Alfreda Duster, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).

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Democrats, any effort to extend the franchise beyond their control would be treated as a threat. These men fought tooth and nail to keep white women from gaining the right to vote. They justified their resistance by claiming that woman suffrage meant black woman suffrage and insisted that black women voters would sound the death knell of white supremacy and “home rule” in the South. But the fact that the most dedicated and virulent antisuffragists were heavily associated with industries dependent on child labor for profits suggested that the threat-to-white-supremacy and states’ rights argument was more strategic than real. The efforts of southern legislatures to defeat the woman suffrage amendment failed, and southern women gained the right to vote through a federal initiative. In November , black and white southern women went to the polls. The Republicans captured the White House and made significant gains in the South. North Carolinians, including new female voters, voted to abolish the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting, and women became an increasing factor in the state’s elections and party organizations. Elsewhere in the South, the voting strength of white women, poor white men, and blacks remained artificially suppressed by poll taxes. Literacy tests, registration restrictions, and intimidation ensured that few black women would vote. But white women’s club and suffrage activists would be aggressive in their push for greater political participation. They built influential factions in whitesonly chapters of the League of Women Voters (LWV), the Association of Business and Profession Women (BPW), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and a variety of civic-minded women’s organizations. In the s, they would begin to test the power of their ballots. A number of southern officials elected prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment were caught in a tight spot once white women finally received the right to vote in the summer of . Democratic legislators in Mississippi and Georgia so feared the political power of white women that they failed to pass enabling legislation that would have allowed the women to vote in the  general election. In Virginia, Governor Westmoreland Davis, like most of the state’s Democratic politicians, opposed woman suffrage when he was elected in . In , Davis, who had further political aspirations, wanted to convince Virginia’s newly enfranchised women that he was their man. Under great pressure from the state League of Women Voters, Davis appointed the Children’s Code Commission to outline the necessary changes and draft legislation pertaining to the treatment and status of women and children. Many of these initiatives were adopted by the  legislature. Meanwhile, Davis made a critical error in the realm of gender politics when he endorsed a staunch former opponent of woman suffrage,

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former congressman Henry St. George Tucker, in the  Democratic gubernatorial primary. The LWV arrayed itself against Tucker and supported a young, relatively unknown state senator, Elbert Lee Trinkle, who had consistently supported progressive causes, particularly good roads, prohibition, and woman suffrage. Trinkle had reportedly “vowed to his wife” that, if elected, he would “lift the state out of the mud” and pass “good roads” legislation to enable rural children to attend school and improve the lives of farm families. Being on the wrong side of the LWV in the governor’s race spelled defeat for former governor Davis who lost in his primary bid for the United States Senate. The LWV’s activism angered many Democratic male politicians. To counterbalance the influence of the more liberal former suffragists, southern Democratic leaders began to seek support from prominent conservative white women. Ironically, LWV leaders also courted white women who had not been part of the suffrage movement, as they hoped to soften the image of women’s rights organizations and harness the political influence of more respectable and traditional white southern ladies. The entrance of southern white women into the electorate clearly altered the political terrain. Arkansas women received the right to vote in the primaries in . Not only did their influence ensure that Arkansas legislators would ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, but candidates who supported woman suffrage, such as the Populist-leaning Thaddeus Caraway whose wife, Hattie, was extremely involved in his campaign, were elected to office in . Legislators also responded to women’s new voting power by passing reform packages designed to restructure public welfare and state institutional care. In Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, white women secured executive government positions in reorganized state public welfare administrations. These reforms came as a result of pressure from organizations such as the WCTU (still active since the s), GFWC (still active since the s), LWV, BPW, AAUW, and former World War I Women’s Councils (which experimented with biracial organizing). The women’s reform agendas had altered little since the s, but having the power of the ballot gave them decidedly more leverage. For example, campaigns for “equal pay for equal work” in education and governmental . Stanley Willis, “‘To Lead Virginia Out of the Mud’: Financing the Old Dominion’s Public Roads, –,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography : (October ): . . Vinton M. Prince, “Will Women Turn the Tide? Mississippi Women and the  United States Senate Race,” Journal of Mississippi History (August ): –.

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service gained new currency. In  and , female department heads at South Carolina’s all-female Winthrop College pressured the college’s president and the Board of Trustees to equalize the pay scales of male and female teachers. The movement leaders were, not surprisingly, woman suffrage activists. In , the trustees and administration, which opposed woman suffrage, not only refused to institute salary-equity reforms, but also fired two female department heads. A number of female faculty members resigned in protest. In , after South Carolina white women began to vote, the salary gap was reduced, but “equal pay for equal work” remained elusive. Having the power of the ballot also opened the way for southern white women to run for public office. A female candidate could even be an advantage—as Democratic men in the Republican stronghold of Buncombe County, North Carolina, learned when, in the primary prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, they elected a woman, Louise Exum Clement, to run for a state house seat in the general election. With the combined support of local women’s organizations, especially the LWV, and Democratic men, Clement defeated her Republican opponent in the  election. Once in office, she successfully fought for legislation that reduced from ten to five the number of years a woman had to be abandoned before being granted a divorce, instituted voter-privacy reforms, and defeated a reactionary conservative movement to defund the state’s public welfare program. Southern white women who had led women’s reform organizations, and were steeled by the battles for prohibition, public welfare, education, and woman suffrage, were also elected to state legislative offices in the s. With the support of the white nonpartisan LWV, former woman suffrage leaders Belle Kearney and Nellie Nugent Somerville were elected to Mississippi’s legislature. In Virginia, Sarah Lee Fain and Helen Timmons Henderson were elected to the state legislature in , and Sallie C. Booker was elected in . In  and , Florida voters sent Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, to the United States Congress. . John W. Hancock, “Jumping on the Bandwagon: The Equal-Pay-for-Equal-Work Controversy at Winthrop College, –,” South Carolina Historical Magazine : (): –. . For more on the first women elected to public office in the South, see Anne Firor Scott, “After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties,” Journal of Southern History  (August ): –; Sandra Gioia Treadway, “Sarah Lee Fain: Norfolk’s First Woman Legislator,” Virginia Cavalcade  (–): –; and Joanne Varner Hawks, “Stepping Out of the Shadows into Politics: Women in the Alabama Legislature,” in Stepping Out of the Shadows: Alabama Women, –, ed. Mary Martha Thomas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), –.

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The s brought some important changes to the political agendas of southern black and white women’s organizations. In response to the racial violence that erupted in northern cities and the South after World War I, concerned southerners established chapters of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) in which white and black education leaders, women’s organization and suffrage leaders, ministers, and philanthropists worked together to improve race relations. Female activists in the CICs worked hand in glove with the growing number of black and white social workers and female public welfare administrators to bring better social services to the region. Although southern legislators had passed social service–reform packages, many conservative politicians strongly resisted increasing the government’s commitment to public welfare and the new programs staffed by women who represented the interests of women’s organizations. Furthermore, the efforts of both the CICs and the welfare activists consistently drew public attention to the problems of low wages, debt peonage, child labor, limited educational and occupational options, and racial discrimination. These activists also sought assistance from agents of the federal government in the U.S. Childrens’ Bureau and prevailed upon these northern experts to study the conditions of white children working in factories and black children laboring in the fields. When southern state legislators targeted the welfare administrations, women’s organizations fought back and stepped up their efforts to increase women’s influence at the ballot box and in the southern executive committees of the Democratic Party. The LWVs also stepped up their efforts to work with liberal Democratic men, such as the University of North Carolina’s president, Frank Graham, who shared the LWV’s dedication to electoral and labor reforms and interracial cooperation. Even in the midst of racial and labor unrest, the organization launched voter registration and getout-the-vote campaigns, exposed election fraud, and conducted their own investigations of conditions in the mills. Increasingly, activists in the southern LWV formed alliances with black political activists and interracialists, such as Lugenia Burns Hope who organized black women in Atlanta to establish health clinics and improve community services for blacks and became a key member of the CIC. In , a coalition of white women, supported primarily by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), established the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Virginia and North . Ann Wells Ellis, “The Commission on Interracial Cooperation, –” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, ); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, ).

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Carolina. The schools taught working women skills for organizing labor movements in the South. By the s, the schools had begun to engage in interracial organizing as well. In the same era, thousands of southern white women joined reactionary, extreme right-wing and racist movements. The reborn Ku Klux Klan widened its net of hate and violence in the s to include Catholics, Jews, immigrants, labor union organizers, and sympathizers as well as people of color. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan emerged as a politically powerful organization. Although a few of the leaders also fought for woman suffrage, these women generally denounced the social reform agenda of the LWV. Reactionary patriotic groups and editors of conservative Democratic newspapers directly challenged the patriotism of the LWV and accused activists, who investigated the working conditions of women in factories, of promoting Bolshevism. This tension reached a fever pitch in  in North Carolina when mill workers, frustrated by the inhumane speedups of their work, reduced pay, and evictions from homes owned by the mills, struck at the Loray Mill in Gastonia. Women were in the thick of the strike. One young woman, Ella May Wiggins, made national news when she cornered Senator Lee Overman in the halls of the Capitol and verbally attacked him for failing to address the problems of child labor and poor labor conditions in the mills. On September , , on the way to a labor rally, Wiggins was shot to death by strikebreakers. The murder and photos of Wiggins’s five orphaned children moved a liberal University of North Carolina history professor, Frank Porter Graham, to condemn the perpetrators in their own language: “‘Americanism,’” he wrote, “was not riding in cars carrying men and guns that day. . . . Americanism was somewhere deep in the heart of this mother who went riding . . . toward what to her was the promise of a better day for her children.” Former suffrage activist, LWV secretary, and newspaperwoman Nell Battle Lewis investigated the use of police violence against striking textile workers and defended strikers accused of killing a sheriff. When the Daughters of the American Revolution lashed out against the LWV, many southern white women who had been members of both organizations felt compelled to . Jacqueline A. Rouse, “The Legacy of Community Organizing: Lugenia Burns Hope and the Neighborhood Union,” Journal of Negro History  (): –; Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, “Self-Help Programs as Educative Activities of Black Women in the South, –: Focus on Four Key Areas,” Journal of Negro Education  (): – ; Mary Frederickson, “The Southern Summer School for Women Workers,” Southern Exposure : (): –. . John A. Salmond, Gastonia, : The Story of the Loray Mill Strike (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –, –, –.

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choose between the two. Such decisions marked ideological moments of truth for white southern female activists and their organizations. In this tense climate, ultraconservative southern Democratic leaders and Republicans actively recruited southern leaders of the WCTU to wage a battle against the  Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith, a Catholic Irish American “wet.” The ideological divisions among politically active southern white women and their organizations that had been surfacing since  reached the national political arena. To abide by the nonpartisan rules of the LWV, liberal leaders of southern chapters abandoned their offices in the organization to campaign for Smith. But southern WCTU leaders, not bound by the same nonpartisan constraints, used their influence in the quasireligious and openly political organization to campaign against Smith. Once conservative southern Democrats rejected Smith in , and helped put a Republican, Herbert Hoover, in the White House, critical ideological lines were drawn (and remain deeply etched into southern politics to this day). The impact of this conflict on the southern LWVs and the southern wing of the Democratic Party was profound. The  defection of southern conservative Democrats caused a shake-up in state party leadership, and those who had remained loyal to Smith reaped the fruits of this restructuring. LWV leaders dedicated to advancing women’s rights and small-d democratic principles, especially voting rights, became leaders in the southern Democratic Party. This political transformation sucked the life out of many LWV chapters but invigorated the Democratic Party. Throughout the South, former leaders in the woman suffrage movement and the LWV led the charge to put Franklin Roosevelt in the White House in . The  election also had a formative effect on blacks and the national Republican Party. Hoover’s victory, made possible by support from the South, inspired GOP leaders to escalate their challenge to Democratic control in the region. To appeal to white southerners, Hoover in  nominated a North Carolina Republican leader, Judge John Parker, to fill a vacancy in the United States Supreme Court. But blacks in his home state remembered Parker’s  governor’s race in which he used white supremacist rhetoric and sent copies of his racist speeches to Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP launched a nationwide movement to block Parker’s nomination. But organizing among blacks in the South was extremely dangerous, even when the political target was a Republican administration. The job fell to a woman, Daisy Lampkin, who traveled throughout the region to reinvigorate NAACP chapters that had grown ineffective and organize new ones. The network she established for the NAACP in the South became an integral part of the

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civil rights movement and served as the training ground for such activists as Rosa Parks. At virtually the same historical moment, a white woman from Texas, former woman suffrage and LWV leader Jesse Daniel Ames, established an organization to fight the lynching of black men in the South. Ames, who moved to Atlanta to work in the headquarters of the CIC, directed the organization’s work among women. Ames, through the Association of Southern White Women for the Prevention of Lynching, used the religious rhetoric of the Bible Belt to expose the hypocrisy in the southern white man’s code of “chivalry,” an ethos that also rendered white women and African Americans subject to the rule of not-so-benevolent white men. This “revolt against chivalry,” as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall terms Ames’s actions, inspired many leading white women, whom Ames specifically invited to join, to use their influence in a range of women’s organizations to fight the worst abuses of the southern patriarchal system. The “conservative” reactionary shift of the Republicans in the s, and the Democrats’ desire to elect a president in , further motivated crossracial and cross-class political alliances. At the local level in , Lugenia Burns Hope organized “citizenship schools” to teach black Atlantans about politics and voter registration. As blacks in the North and South shifted their allegiance to the Democratic Party, southern liberal women launched state-level anti–poll tax movements, pushed for liberal social programs, and worked with politicians who pointed the Democratic Party toward a more inclusive future. In the early years of the Great Depression, Mary McLeod Bethune, an accomplished black educator and daughter of a Florida sharecropper, educated Eleanor Roosevelt about the needs of the black masses. Bethune established the National Council of Negro Women, an overtly political organization, and supported FDR. Through her appointment in the National Youth Administration and as an influential member of FDR’s Black Cabinet, Bethune forged “a critical link between the New Deal and the civil rights movement.” But shifting political allegiance of leading southern black women from the GOP to the Democratic Party caused tension and dissent within more established black women’s clubs in which Republican stalwarts still commanded great influence. Nonetheless, in South Carolina, . Hall, Revolt against Chivalry. . Douglas B. Craig, After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, ): .

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North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, black women who had been active in state Republican Party organizations, but supported the New Deal’s focus on economic programs, began to establish Democratic organizations and campaign for Democratic candidates. During the crisis of the Great Depression, southern women pressed the Democratic Party to be more open to women’s influence. The unprecedented election of Arkansas’s Hattie Caraway to the United States Senate in  is a case in point. Through a temporary appointment, and a special election that produced an unprecedented turnout among Arkansas’s white female voters, Caraway was chosen to fill the vacancy in the Senate caused by the death of her husband, Thaddeus, in . Although state Democratic leaders had supported her vacancy appointment, they were shocked when Caraway announced her intention to keep her Senate seat and run in her own right in . When Arkansas’s leading Democratic men refused to back her in the primaries, her Senate seatmate from Louisiana, Huey Long, stepped into the breach and offered to assist Caraway’s campaign. Together with the controversial and left-leaning Long, Caraway barnstormed through the state and took full advantage of the publicity the unique campaign attracted. She won in the primaries and general election. In office, she established herself as a liberal New Dealer, and with the support of such “radical” and “militant” agrarian–labor reform organizations as the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), she was reelected in  without the assistance of Huey Long who had been assassinated in . As southern white women gained political power in the s, their personal styles became increasingly important weapons in their arsenals of persuasion. Myrtle Lawrence, a white high-profile activist in the STFU, found that her rather rough southern style impeded her effectiveness. Her snuff dipping, especially, distracted New York audiences who were otherwise sympathetic to her cause of fairer treatment of sharecroppers and tenant farmers by the government. Lawrence found herself eased off the list of public speakers, although she continued her work behind the scenes. In contrast, Hattie Caraway’s quiet, unobtrusive, motherly style made her seem like a fairly innocuous figure in the Senate—that is, until her votes canceled those of conservative anti–New Deal southern Democrats. Historians still have yet to fully appreciate the cunning and wisdom behind “Silent Hattie’s” political style. But Yankee women at the helm of the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party discovered Caraway’s less “silent” side and sent her on a . Elizabeth Ann Payne, “The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Southern Cultures : (): –.

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multicity speaking tour to demonstrate the party’s interest in women’s issues and its support of female candidates. Many conservative southern Democratic politicians, especially the ones who ascended to power before the  election, resisted New Deal reforms that represented the culmination of women’s reform movements. Persuading such men to support liberal causes would take a kind of skill few northern Democratic female leaders could muster. So, in the s, Democratic women deployed an important secret weapon: dedicated, effective, and savvy southern female campaigners and lobbyists whose “sweet southern style” (more sophisticated and polished than Caraway’s) had been an important factor in the successful  campaigns. In North Carolina, where women voters unencumbered by the poll tax requirement voted in significant numbers, a cadre of liberal white female leaders held positions of power within state and local Democratic organizations. Harriet Wisemen Elliott, a professor of government at the women’s college in Greensboro, encouraged her students to take an interest in the rights of women, labor, people of color, and the poor. She groomed several of her most gifted students who embraced liberal and feminist philosophies to become effective campaigners and leaders in the Democratic Party. One particularly talented student, Gladys Avery Tillett, spent some of her college years studying women’s working conditions in Greensboro’s textile mills and fighting for woman suffrage. In the divisive  presidential election, Tillett campaigned for Al Smith and renounced the “conservative” southern Democrats and anti-Catholic forces that joined with the WCTU to defeat Smith. Tillett’s skill and determination impressed Eleanor Roosevelt and Molly Dewson, chief of the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party in the s. They hired Tillett to organize women in the South and galvanize support for the New Deal. Tillett became a key figure in a partnership of northern and southern Democratic women who pressured FDR to support social programs and place women in policy-making positions. As an organizer for the party’s Women’s Division, Gladys Tillett proved to be a master strategist, particularly adept at the kind of guerrilla warfare needed to counter the influence of southern conservatives who resisted liberal New Deal programs. In March , Tillett gathered together in Richmond more than one thousand white Democratic women from Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas to show support for Social Security legislation. The featured speaker was Louise Galleher, a Florida native, former assistant to U.S. Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen, and national committeewoman for the Virginia Young Democrats. Galleher was there to deliver a special message to Virginia’s Democratic senator Harry Byrd, a formidable opponent of Social

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Security. In her Deep South accent, Galleher appealed to the “chivalrous gentlemen of Virginia . . . [who] always have given their gentlewomen practically anything they really wanted.” Even though these “chivalrous gentlemen,” Galleher observed, opposed woman suffrage on the basis of states’ rights, surely they would not deny the ten thousand white female voters in the Virginia Young Democrats who wanted the federal protection Social Security promised to provide. The women also used less obvious methods to advance liberal causes within the party. Harriet Elliott was drafted by Molly Dewson to persuade North Carolina Democratic senator Robert Doughton to support Social Security, which he did. Tillett and Elliott also received the controversial job of increasing women’s power in the party’s infrastructure. At the  Democratic Convention, the two North Carolina female delegates used stealth and subterfuge to slip through the Rules Committee a proposal requiring that alternates for platform committee members had to be of the opposite sex of regular committee members (who were all men). Unsuspecting male party leaders learned of the “feminist coup” in the New York Times. Women’s roles in shaping Democratic platforms increased from that moment on. As a national campaign speaker for FDR in , Tillett threw all her energies into advancing the new Democratic agenda that reflected the liberal and feminist ideals she cherished, or, as she explained it to her husband, “This thing we call the Cause.” In the s, Tillett was appointed head of the Women’s Division and elected vice chair of the national Democratic Party. The administration’s restructuring of social programs away from relief initiatives and toward war mobilization complicated her job. In this shift, many southern female reformers who had high-level jobs in government lost their positions, an indication of the fading power of feminists that accompanied the expansion of military influence in the federal government. In a move designed to assure female activists that women still wielded influence at the highest levels of the party, Tillett was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the  Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But with the death of FDR, and the further displacement of Eleanor Roosevelt’s political influence that accompanied Truman’s ascendancy, the feminist agenda previously evident in the work of the Women’s Division waned. Even as the war and cold war dampened the influence of southern Democratic women in federal and state government, black and white women in . Gladys Tillett to Charlie Tillett, June , , Gladys Tillett Papers, the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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the South exercised increasing political power during the s. Grace Hamilton, black director of Atlanta’s Urban League, and Josephine Wilkins, a white woman suffragist and LWV leader, worked in the Southern Regional Council, successor to the CIC, to expose corrupt election practices and conduct voter registration campaigns that targeted women and blacks. In , the United States Supreme Court declared the Democratic white primaries unconstitutional, and black women in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia began to insist that they deserved a place in state party infrastructures. In a  special election, strong voter turnout in an Atlanta black district defeated a conservative Democratic man and sent to the United States Congress Helen Douglas Mankin, a popular white state congresswoman who fought for public welfare and education. The election demonstrated the potential influence of black voters when teamed up with southern liberal white women, such as Mankin. At the federal level, southern white and black women, such as Virginia Durr, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Church Terrell, worked together through the Civil Rights Committee of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, and the NAACP to tear down the barriers to voting in the South. Bethune and Terrell also promoted anti–poll tax legislation through the National Council for Negro Women and the National Association of Colored Women. Black women in southern chapters of the NAACP worked for federal anti–poll tax legislation during the s. But considering the racist climate, if they had taken the lead in state anti–poll tax campaigns, their participation would have greatly hindered the formation of the white support base that was crucial for the advancement of the cause. At the very least, the anti–poll tax movement gave southern liberal black and white women a common cause. In March , Mrs. Sherwood Anderson, a member of the national board of the YWCA and wife of the famous southern author, testified before the Senate subcommittee hearings on the poll tax that, as a resident of Virginia, she had experienced the corruption associated with the poll tax. Furthermore, as a representative of the YWCA she wanted the senators to know that the organization’s , women members had “in no uncertain terms” resolved to work for the removal of the poll tax. Many of the summer and local conferences in which the YWCA women discussed and promoted anti–poll tax legislation in this period were integrated. . “Statement of Mrs. Sherwood Anderson, Member of the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association,” in Poll Tax Hearings (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), –.

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It was exactly this kind of shift toward interracial cooperation and a small-d democratic agenda, spearheaded by the biracial Southern Regional Council, that convinced Truman to support civil rights measures, including abolition of the poll tax, a move that cemented support from African American voters. At the  Democratic Convention, southern conservatives clashed with Truman’s supporters over the civil rights plank and fought to retake control of the party. In response to Truman’s nomination, South Carolina’s senator Strom Thurmond led a splinter group of ultraconservative southerners from the convention hall and formed their own party, the Dixiecrats, which they claimed truly represented the interests of white southerners. However, the state Alabama Democratic Executive Committee that issued the Alabama delegation’s marching orders also systematically blocked homegrown liberal and feminist white women from state party leadership. These women countered by organizing a tough coalition of BPW, Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), and AAUW leaders; female lawyers; and feminist professors. The women’s coalition spearheaded movements for “equal pay for equal work,” jury service for women, and abolition of the poll tax and reestablished a moribund LWV chapter in Montgomery to fight specifically for poll tax reform. Clearly, Alabama’s Dixiecrats did not represent all Democrats in the state, and they knew it. As southern white conservatives fought to control the party and the election machinery, Gladys Tillett decided that her skills were most needed in the southern battleground. She resigned from her national party post in  and returned to North Carolina to help Senator Frank Graham, a liberal and former president of the University of North Carolina, fight to keep his Senate seat. Graham’s opponent in the Democratic primary, Willis Smith, appealed to racism and intolerance by pledging to defend white supremacy and by casting Graham as a friend to blacks and communists. Smith’s campaign marked the rise of a young conservative Democrat and a right-wing political strategist, Jesse Helms, who as a television newscaster in Raleigh reached a wide audience with his dramatic commentaries blasting Graham. Willis Smith’s victory over Graham devastated the dedicated and now-aging network of white liberal feminists in the state. Even Nell Battle Lewis, who had championed the cause of the Gastonia strikers in , buckled under the pressure of “commie-baiting” and renounced her support of liberal causes. . For more on the  Senate race in North Carolina, see Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and the Political Consequence since  (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), –. Salmond, Gastonia, , .

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Likewise in Texas,  marked the rise of an aggressive, racist right-wing extremism that not only attracted some southern white women but was also encouraged and disseminated by them. In Fort Worth, Ida Darden began publishing the Southern Conservative, a newspaper filled with vitriolic diatribes against unions, minorities, civil rights, the United Nations, and liberal politicians. Her ideology had been greatly influenced by Senator Joe Bailey who, in the s, opposed labor unions, woman suffrage, taxes, and Prohibition. Darden championed the causes of white supremacy and anticommunism and defended Republican senator Joe McCarthy’s fiercely paranoid abuse of power that capitalized on citizens’ fears of “the enemy within.” For eleven years, until the Southern Conservative’s final number in , Darden stoked the fires of racial hatred in Texas. As internal disagreements over civil rights persisted within the southern wings of the Democratic Party, southern black women became more active in electoral reform movements. Encouraged by the Alabama white women’s movement to abolish the poll tax, efforts that moved legislators to reduce the poll tax in , a black professor, Mary Fair Burke, asked the whites-only Montgomery LWV chapter if she could join. When the white women refused, Burke responded by organizing the black Women’s Political Caucus (WPC) of Montgomery. When Rosa Parks was arrested for defying the city’s Jim Crow transportation laws, the WPC, led by another black professor, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, launched and sustained the bus boycott that many historians consider the starting point of the modern civil rights movement. The event also marked the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a leader in the nonviolent southern-based movement. In the s and s, as in earlier eras, southern black farm women continued to battle for economic and political justice. After being jailed and savagely beaten for her leadership in registering black voters in Mississippi, a black sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, played a pivotal role in the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP represented an alternative political structure to the state’s closed whites-only male-dominated Democratic organization. In , the strong resolve of the MFDP’s female delegates to be seated at the Democratic National Convention forced white leaders to pledge to support further voting rights legisla. George N. Green, “Ida Darden and the Southern Conservative,” Gulf South Historical Review : (): –. . Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ), xiii; J. Thornton Mills III, “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of –,” Alabama Review (July ): – n. .

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tion and to declare that future state delegations had to be legally elected and racially representative of their constituency. From that moment on, more black women attended local Democratic meetings in the South. Such advances in civil rights, especially the implementation of school desegregation laws in the South, further increased the ranks of “sixth front” reactionary southern white women, many of whom found their standard-bearer in the independent presidential candidate, George Wallace. For thousands of formerly Democratic southern white women, voting for Wallace would be their defining moment in political self-identification as they turned away from the national Democratic Party, never to return. With the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of  and ’, white and black southern women increased their power in the Democratic Party, and black women, in particular, broke barriers to elective office. With the party’s support, Atlanta’s Grace Hamilton became the first black woman elected to a state legislature in the Deep South. In , with the support of Lyndon Johnson, Houston’s Barbara Jordan was elected to the United States House of Representatives. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Tillett continued to be active in Democratic politics. Not only did she support the civil rights movement and the Democratic agenda of the “Great Society,” but she traveled to Third World countries on behalf of the United Nations to discuss policies and programs affecting women and children. Older feminists in the administration and the Women’s Division, together with leaders from the emerging modern feminist movement, succeeded in adding gender discrimination to the list of employment practices considered illegal under the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Southern conservative legislators supported this change in hopes of killing the bill. The passage of the law was followed by a host of state and local reforms targeting gender discrimination in the legal system and the workplace. Several southern all-male state universities at last became coed, and women in Alabama were finally allowed to serve on juries. But rather than attacking the myriad of discriminatory laws and practices separately, many feminists, including Tillett and Jordan, wanted to amend the Constitution to state that rights of citizens could not be abridged “on account of sex.” Richard Nixon’s ascendancy to the White House, through his appeal to the “silent majority” of Americans who, he insisted, supported U.S. military action in Southeast Asia and opposed Great Society reforms, drew more . Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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southerners to the GOP and moved the party even further to the right. Feminists were vilified in the press as perverted and dangerous to the American family. In this climate of hate, women who believed that they should not be discriminated against on the basis of sex found a powerful role model in Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Not only was Jordan a dedicated feminist and civil rights lawyer, but her eloquent interpretation of the sanctity of federal rights and protections during the Watergate hearings and her condemnation of the abuses of power by President Richard Nixon’s administration amazed and impressed millions of Americans. Many white southerners came to realize that this remarkably intelligent black woman spoke for them and believed as they believed. They were thankful for her stewardship. For Republican leaders, Jordan’s part in the hearings that led to the president’s resignation fueled their determination to build a stronger power base in Texas. The turmoil of the s and ’s, the civil rights marches, antiwar demonstrations, and modern feminist campaigns against gender discrimination and for reproductive rights, accelerated the movement of southern whites into the Republican Party. Racially conservative southern white women, who fiercely resisted integration and established private white-flight, or “seg,” schools, could no longer feel comfortable in the southern Democratic Party. They drifted into the Republican camp. To many white fundamentalist Christian women, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification in , seemed to devalue women’s God-ordained place as mothers and homemakers. These women passionately argued that the proposed amendment threatened to let men off the hook as providers and protectors and that women would be forced to become breadwinners, and even soldiers. Conservative southern white women insisted that the ERA meant that all public bathrooms would be shared indiscriminately by men and women. This situation would throw black men together with white women in intimate and dangerous ways. In , a coalition of ultraconservatives and antifeminists, led by Democratic senator Sam Ervin, John Birch Society members, Republican powerhouse Phyllis Schlafly, and right-wing southern Christian fundamentalists, fought the ratification of the ERA. The primary battlegrounds were in the South. In , Gladys Tillett entered the trenches for her last political battle in . For an in-depth examination of the racial politics and gender issues involved in the North Carolina Equal Rights Amendment ratification battle, see Jane De Hart and Donald Mathews, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of the ERA (New York: Oxford University Press, ).

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North Carolina on behalf of women’s rights and, in her final days of public work, devoted her energies to ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment against tough opposition from North Carolina’s senators. One was Tillett’s old political ally and childhood friend Sam Ervin, and the other was a familiar political enemy and leading arch-conservative, Republican senator Jesse Helms. By , Ervin, Helms, and a militant phalanx of anti-ERA southern white women turned the tide against the ERA. The North Carolina legislature’s rejection of the amendment was especially painful for Tillett who had worked since the s for women’s rights. Even more disheartening for Tillett was the fact that her ideological opponents had grown stronger in the fight. Severely damaged by Nixon’s demise, the Republican Party turned to antifeminist and anti–civil rights sentiment as rich sources of much needed political capital. The issues of abortion and women in the military, especially, invigorated the religious Right and generated revenue and votes for the Republicans, especially in the South. In this climate, southern female politicians had to avoid being perceived as “women’s libbers.” Widows, such as Louisiana’s Lindy Boggs, who succeeded her husband, United States Congressman Hale Boggs, were viewed as “safe” female politicians in the region. Perhaps her cover as a southern lady allowed Boggs to spearhead legislation on civil rights and pay equity for women in governmental service. The influence of southern Democratic “stealth feminists,” such as Boggs and many other southern black and white women who served in Congress from the s to the present, has yet to be fully understood or appreciated. By the s, the migration of northerners and westerners to the Sunbelt further swelled the ranks of Republicans in the South, especially in wealthy suburbs created by white flight. But even in the midst of the Reagan revolution, when southern white voters repeatedly sent such Republican “conservatives” as Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, and Trent Lott to represent them at the federal level, southern women began to indicate that their agenda for change was not in accord with such retrograde politicians. By the s, a gender gap, or a significant difference between the voting behavior of men and women, was becoming discernable in U.S. politics. In Arkansas, it was becoming evident that southern white women voters sometimes preferred candidates that their husbands, brothers, and fathers clearly rejected. It is a little-known but important political fact that the votes of Arkansas women, over and against the majority of votes cast by the state’s male voters, put the young, progressive politician Bill Clinton and his activist, feminist lawyer wife, Hillary, in the governor’s mansion. Conservative southern politicians worked to diminish the impact of the gender gap and

Stealth in the Political Arsenal

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seized upon abortion in an effort to divide women voters and put women’s rights leaders on the defensive. This strategy made a portion of northern Republican politicians uneasy, including the previously prochoice presidential candidate from Texas, George Bush. It also rendered Bush beholden to the powerful religious Right, now organized by the southern-based, highly patriarchal Christian Coalition that reached millions of voters through ostensibly religious political television programs and Sunday sermons that told parishioners how God wanted them to vote. However, Bush was not really a Texan. He was a millionaire patrician northerner and carpetbagger. Considering the southern strategy at the heart of the Republican  campaign, it is not surprising that a charismatic Democratic politician, with an Arkansas accent, Baptist background, and the overwhelming support of women, defeated Bush and his Republican strategists and reclaimed the White House for the Democrats. As women continued to support the Clinton-Clinton-Gore administration, Republican strategists seized on another gender issue, Clinton’s extramarital affairs, in a desperate hope of undercutting the administration’s popularity among women and finally extracting some payback for Nixon’s demise. The conservative southern Republicans’ self-righteous, and hypocritical, outrage at Democratic philandering precipitated the downfall of Bob Livingstone and Newt Gingrich. Indeed, several Republican congressmen who participated in the transparently partisan impeachment hearings lost their seats by . At the same time, the bowed but unbroken feminist liberal Hillary Clinton fended off macho Republican opponents in New York, whose demeanor turned off female voters. She was elected to the United States Senate in . But it must be remembered that it was Hillary Clinton’s focus on education reform in a southern state, not in New York, that launched her political career and certainly helped her husband’s. Like the Clintons, Senator Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas’s second female U.S. senator, and Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana (both white Democrats) owed their victories to support they received primarily from nonwhite voters and white women. The same is true of Sheila Jackson Lee and Eddie Bernice Johnson, black U.S. congresswomen from Texas. With increases in the Hispanic Catholic population, Hispanic women in Texas and Florida are carving inroads into both major parties. The South’s “new minorities” hold the political balance in their hands, and campaigns for their votes and political allegiance, and control of Hispanic and Latino media, will be the battleground of the future. The same battles that brought southern women into the political arena a century ago continue to draw them in now. The issues of education, public health (which now includes environmental issues), child welfare, civil rights,

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and gender equity have all moved into the center of regional and national politics. The sixth front of reactionary resistance to liberal advances has embraced the rhetoric of southern women’s causes at the same time that “conservative” Republicans, even the “compassionate” ones, seem bent on undoing what southern feminist New Dealers fought to put in place, especially Social Security. As southern Republican politicians lead attacks on government programs that seek to solve the century’s social responsibilities and problems, women across the nation join the ranks of the Democratic Party. It is not surprising that in their efforts to beat Al Gore, also a Baptist from the South, the Republicans not only backed a more southern version of former president George Bush, his born-again Texas–native son George W., but also promised a softer, seemingly more maternal Republican agenda for the new millennium. Furthermore, they strategically kept less “compassionate” southerners, such as Helms, Gingrich, Lott, and Thurmond, far offstage at the Republican National Convention. In , Republican strategists maneuvered to capture the political power of women’s home and family issues and simultaneously demonize and isolate prochoice feminists and gays. But the irony of the – election is that not only did the majority of voters choose Al Gore over George W. Bush, but in the pivotal state of Florida, the gender gap was significant as well. The majority of Florida’s female voters across the racial spectrum chose Al Gore to be their president at the dawning of the new millennium. Even inflating the number of white male voters, through the aggressive pursuit of military absentee ballots in “conservative” counties and using Republican governor Jeb Bush’s political machine to disfranchise thousands of black voters, was not sufficient to cement Al Gore’s “defeat.” Indeed, it would take a “sixth front,” a “conservative,” rich Republican white woman, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, chairman of George W. Bush’s Florida campaign, to hold the line against a Gore victory and a Republican-dominated Supreme Court to force her will upon the nation. Clearly, in , southern women had arrived at the pinnacle of political power. Ironically, Harris’s actions, which exposed the severely flawed and corrupt underbelly of the voting system, may have provided a catalyst for electoral reforms and further invigorated African American and Democratic voters as well as increased the likelihood that their votes will be counted! Or, the fact that Harris’s intervention succeeded could signal to undemocratic forces in the South that disfranchisement is an acceptable method for winning elections. Only time will tell. Predictions, by their very nature, are perilous and questionable enterprises, so it is with some hesitation that I cast my eye into what is a very uncertain

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future. I originally prepared this essay as a talk for the Converse College conference and had the extraordinary task of revising my talk on political history as CNN televised images of Republican storm troopers disrupting the counting of ballots and the infamous  election hung in the balance. My fear at the time was that an administration that comes to power by such methods clearly has little regard for basic democratic principles and would not hesitate to use fear and intimidation to control the electoral process, even the citizenry, in order to remain in power. Before September , , and before what may well be our final day of peace for the foreseeable future (as I sit now at the keyboard on March , ), I wrote the following conclusion: In thinking about what predictions my understanding of southern women’s political history suggests, Gladys Tillett again comes to mind. Nearly twenty years ago, I made a pilgrimage to visit her in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was confined to her bed in a nursing home. I was rapidly uncovering documents in women’s organization and Democratic Party records that revealed Tillett’s local and national importance and her remarkable though illfated fight, as an elderly woman, for the Equal Rights Amendment. None of these records could answer a basic question I had regarding the persistent difficulties white and black women encountered trying to change inequities within southern society. I wanted to know, from an activist’s point of view, why success and lasting change had been and remain so elusive, why issues regarding women’s basic rights and freedoms had not been settled long ago. I posed these questions near the end of our visit. She did not answer immediately, but, as I began to leave, she suddenly said in a very deliberate and introspective voice, “There was just too much war. There was just too much war.” Nothing at that time prepared me to hear her response as an answer to my question. But through the years, her words slowly sank into my consciousness and informed my understanding of the enormous obstacles Tillett and other liberal white and black southern women faced in their efforts to democratize the nation, and the critical roles these women played in this latest “century of struggle.” Perhaps at this juncture in history questions would be more useful than predictions. Will southern women’s willingness to cross class, racial, ethnic, and religious lines to forge political alliances continue to generate a backlash among “conservative” southern white men? Will southern Republican women allow their party to use traditional women’s issues and religion as camouflage in an ideological power struggle that pits well-armed, well-financed, angry white “conservative” men against everybody else? Will undemocratic

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mechanisms continue “artificially” to enhance the power of “conservative” southern Republicans, much as they once kept “conservative” southern Democrats in power? Will southern women, black and white, take the lead in dismantling structures of disfranchisement? Or will there continue to be, as Gladys Tillett observed, “just too much war”?

s Working in the Shadows     

arbara . oods Race both defined southern women’s identity and tended to divide those women, thus retarding the development of a strong women’s movement in the southern states. — .    . , ., Sex, Race, and the Role of Women in the South

The history of America’s civil rights movement has been written many times and in many ways. The history of southern women’s participation in the civil rights movement is a complex topic of research, for southern history is filled with women who defy stereotypes—women who served as the catalysts for social change in a world rigidly circumscribed by racial and gender boundaries. Hawks and Skemp are right: race divided most southern women, but some crossed racial lines to work to improve the lives of African Americans. Black and white women worked together to file the lawsuits, organize the protest marches, and forge the direct-action campaigns that transformed the South. Female civil rights workers represented various backgrounds and locales, but they confronted a common adversary: the racist, conservative southern power structure that profited from maintaining a segregated, unequal society. In the face of this common enemy, southern women from all walks of life united across racial, class, and gender barriers. The women who participated in the civil rights movement rarely captured the attention of the news media. Most operated behind the scenes and in support roles, yet their contributions paved the way for the movement’s success. These pioneers need to be recognized and heralded for the roles they played and for the 

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contributions that they made. Although a few of these women have begun to enter the civil rights narrative, the stories of most have been obscured by the attention paid to many of the male civil rights workers. Thus, female civil rights workers linger in the shadows waiting to be recognized for their sacrifices and accomplishments. Their life stories need to be recorded so that history can accurately portray the story of the past and fill in the gaps of the history of the civil rights movement in America. It would not be possible in a single essay to chronicle the contributions made by the hundreds of women who suffered and struggled together to improve life for black people in the South. This essay will first briefly review the literature on black and white women in the civil rights movement, identifying some directions for future research. Then I will look closely at the lives of six lesser-known leaders in an effort to trace patterns in women’s civil rights activities and to refocus the lens of scholarly research upon the lives of those who merit further study. We need to examine the factors that divided and united female civil rights workers. We also need to pay more attention to the way intra- and interracial networks of female civil rights leaders operated, in order to better understand the ways in which female activists achieved their goals. Finally, we need to know more about the organizations and institutions in the South that groomed activist women. The movement for black equality began in earnest during the era of the abolitionist movement, and from the outset, men and women of both races fought tirelessly to bring the nightmare of African enslavement in America to an end. For their participation in this movement, many lost their fortunes and their homes, and some their lives, and others rose to national leadership and gained fame. The coming of the Civil War brought hope for African American freedom, and again blacks and whites worked together to secure a role for black soldiers in the war effort. During Reconstruction, black southerners and their white allies made some early efforts at interracial coopera. Some good sources with which to begin a study on women in the civil rights movement include Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from  to  (New York: Scribner, ); Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline A. Rouse, and Barbara A. Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, –  (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, ); Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, ); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves (New York: W. W. Norton, ); and Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, ).

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tion, but they were unable to counter the hostilities directed against them as the nation tired of fighting for black rights. Southern blacks, in particular, were relegated to a form of second-class citizenship: legal separation from the mainstream of society. In the twentieth century, it would take decades to reverse the  Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling of the Supreme Court, and once again the change would be the result of concerted efforts by people of both races. Historian Harvard Sitkoff has suggested that “until the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the struggle for racial equality had been largely the domain of a northern elite oriented primarily toward legal action.” But Sitkoff’s analysis is only partially correct. Middle-class southern blacks had a long tradition of working tirelessly for racial uplift. In most southern towns and cities, there were civic improvement groups and efforts by community leaders to achieve racial reform through local governing bodies. When National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branches were founded across the South, they provided an avenue for organizing the struggle on both the state and the national levels. Through local NAACP chapters, the northern headquarters began to give the kind of direction that Sitkoff discusses. While the financial support and expertise of the national NAACP strengthened local efforts, the NAACP did not simply appear fully organized in local communities. Instead, the NAACP came to communities that had strong local leadership, and many southern blacks of both sexes worked quietly toward NAACP goals long before the  Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision or the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Throughout the South, women were the backbone of NAACP chapters and other organizations that aimed to improve race relations. One such woman was Lulu Belle Madison White. Born in the eastern Texas town of Elmo, as an adult she settled in Houston, and enjoyed a long and successful career as one of the leaders of the NAACP. Louisiana native Althea T. L. Simmons of Shreveport also had an illustrious professional career with the NAACP. She met Thurgood Marshall when he came to her state to argue the NAACP’s teacher salaries–equalization cases. Then a student at Southern University, Simmons was asked to take notes for the NAACP’s litigator. This experience influenced her decision to become a civil rights lawyer. After completing Howard University Law School, she went to Dallas and volunteered to work with the NAACP. She eventually became director of the NAACP’s . Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, –, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .

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Washington, D.C., bureau. Like Simmons and White, Modjeska Monteith Simkins of South Carolina began her work with the local chapter of the NAACP. She had a public career that included association with more than fifty progressive reform organizations. Simkins also ran, unsuccessfully, for public office in Columbia, and she was active in politics until the end of her life. Across the South, dozens more of these pioneering reformers labored in obscurity. A full-length study of women’s work in the NAACP and other civil rights organizations remains to be written. Younger women also forged activist careers in the NAACP. Born in  in Bennettsville, South Carolina, Marion Wright Edelman left home to attend Spelman College in Atlanta. In college, she volunteered with the NAACP, becoming aware that impoverished African Americans had no money for legal representation. As a result, she decided to pursue a career in law. After graduation from Yale Law School, Edelman became one of the first two NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund interns and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where she opened her own law practice and continued her civil rights crusade. She helped to found a Head Start program for the poor. She later married Peter Edelman, a Jewish attorney, and moved with him to Washington, D.C., in . There she founded the Children’s Legal Defense Fund, and she has had a long and productive career in reform, especially with projects related to children’s welfare. Myrlie Evers Williams of Vicksburg became an activist and a national NAACP director after the  assassination of her husband, Mississippi NAACP director Medgar W. Evers. Like black women, white southern women worked for the cause of civil rights long before the Brown decision. Alice Spearman Wright was active in many organizations and is perhaps best known for her leadership of the South Carolina Human Relations Council in Columbia. Georgian Lillian Smith made a career writing about the evils of the South’s racial caste system . Merline Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, –  (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, ); Barbara A. Woods, “Modjeska Simkins and the South Carolina Conference of NAACP, –,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, –; Barbara A. Woods Aba-Mecha, “Black Woman Activist in Twentieth-Century South Carolina: The Public Career of Modjeska Monteith Simkins” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, ). . Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, ); Barbara Carlisle Bigelow, ed., Contemporary Black Biography, vol.  (Detroit: Gale Research, ). Myrlie Evers’s recollection of her life with Evers and their participation in the Mississippi civil rights movement is published in a memoir, For Us, the Living (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ).

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and working with the Congress for Racial Equality and other organizations aimed at gaining civil rights for blacks. The  Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education galvanized the modern civil rights movement. The decision opened the door for southern black leaders to press for the integration of public schools and, by extension, other segregated facilities. The national media carried the stories of the various local integration campaigns to the American public, helping civil rights workers gain both physical and financial support from sympathetic people outside of their communities. Women were central in school integration. As parents and as teachers, they made sacrifices and organized local integration efforts. Most of what we know about girls’ and women’s participation in school desegregation comes from the memoirs of the women themselves. The presence of National Guardsmen and rioters dominated the coverage of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock in the national media. Daisy Bates, the adviser to the Little Rock Nine, and Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the students who desegregated Central High, have written accounts of their roles in the desegregation campaign. Similarly, Mae Bertha Carter of Mississippi fought to enroll her children in white schools in her rural community. A gap would be closed if the narratives of a number of the parents and students involved were written. These accounts would shed light upon the difficulties they faced as they sought to break down the barriers of segregation and racism that beset their society. The women who integrated the South’s major universities at great physical and emotional risk also deserve further study. For example, Autherine Lucy Foster, of Shiloh, Alabama, who courageously enrolled at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa on February , , remembers that her life was in danger every day that she attended school, for mobs gathered on the campus and defiantly threatened her life. A few days after she enrolled, the university expelled her, supposedly for her safety. Lucy told one author that she “used to sometimes look back on the situation and see it as somewhat of a failure in my life. Now I look at it from a different perspective. I view it as a stepping . Marcia Synott of the University of South Carolina is writing a biography of Wright. For more on Smith, see her autobiography, Killers of the Dream, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, ). . Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, ); Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High (New York: Pocket Books, ). For more on Carter, see Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, ).

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stone in the civil rights movement. A lot of people saw that young woman who seemed so quiet and easygoing, and thought, If she can step out and do a thing like that, then I can too.” Later, other women integrated other southern universities, inspired in part by Lucy’s courageous example. In , Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes desegregated the University of Georgia in Athens. Better known than Lucy, Hunter-Gault became a journalist and media personality in her professional life. We need to know more about the African American women who opened the doors of the South’s colleges to their sisters, the nature of their experiences there, and particularly the way southern universities were transformed by integration. Perhaps the most famous women of the civil rights movement are the courageous African American women who labored for change in Montgomery. Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council and their pioneering role in organizing the bus boycott are commemorated in a memoir by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, longtime president of the organization. Other Montgomery women leaders, such as Mary Fair Burks and Rosa Lee McCauley Parks, have narrated their own accounts. Indeed, Rosa Parks, who served as the catalyst for this struggle, has been enshrined as an American icon. Yet even in a story as well known as the Montgomery story, the roles of many other women who were important in the bus boycott campaign have been largely forgotten. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy’s struggles are also the stories of joint partnership with their spouses; Coretta Scott King and Juanita Abernathy worked alongside their husbands. Yet the work of these two black women has not been studied. Johnnie Carr, another woman leader of Montgomery, was the subject of a biography for young readers, but we need a full-length scholarly study of her work. . Lucy quoted in Brian Lanker, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, ), . Hunter-Gault, who integrated the University of Georgia in , is certainly better known because of her autobiography, In My Place (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, ), and her pioneering work as a journalist. For more on Hunter-Gault and her experiences at the University of Georgia, see Calvin Trillin, An Education in Georgia: Charlayne Hunter, Hamilton Holmes, and the Integration of the University of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ). . David J. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ); Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, ); Carr with her friends Parks, E. D. Nixon, King, and others in the Montgomery civil rights struggle, as told to Randall Williams, Johnnie: The Life of Johnnie Rebecca Carr (Montgomery: Black Belt Press, ).

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Virginia Foster Durr, an important white ally during the Montgomery bus boycott, has been heralded widely for her contributions to civil rights. Active in a variety of interracial human rights organizations that worked in the South, including the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and later the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), Durr was outspoken, caring not a whit that she was going against the grain of expected behavior for southern, upper-class white women. Durr knew Rosa Parks and had, in fact, encouraged Parks to attend a training workshop at the Highlander Folk School a year or two before the bus boycott. She and other white Montgomery citizens provided important support to the campaign to integrate the city’s buses. In , the Greensboro sit-in marked the beginning of a new and more radical stage of the civil rights movement. Across the South, thousands of college students of both races confronted the Jim Crow system, and a new group of women emerged as leaders of the movement. Young women of both races eagerly moved into roles as activists, and older women, veterans of small and large fights for racial justice, provided crucial guidance and support for these students leaders. Ella Baker, a black veteran of the NAACP and the SCLC, deserves the accolade “mother of the civil rights movement” for her role in supporting the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its young leaders. More than a motherly adviser to student activists, Baker was an iconoclast who charted a course where women were not accepted or expected to succeed, challenging the authority and sexism of male civil rights leaders. In several accounts, Dianne Nash Bevel emerges as a key leader of young activists who stepped forward and made a major contribution in their determination to work for social change. Atlantan Ruby Doris Smith was another key student leader in the SNCC. Constance Curry became a leader among young southern whites who were sympathetic to the civil rights campaigns that were taking place in the South. Just as Bevel inspired young black women to take part in the movement, Curry influenced young white women like Joan Browning. These tantalizing references to the importance of some women in inspiring others to join the civil rights movement suggest that we need to pay more attention to the networks among women. We also need to know more about the role played by specific organizations and institutions in drawing female students—especially white students—into the movement. In autobiographical essays, both Dorothy Dawson Burlage and Sandra “Casey” Cason Hayden discuss the University . Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ).

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of Texas at Austin (UT) during the mid-s, which Burlage describes as “a liberal oasis in the state.” Both women mention being influenced by several outspoken women leaders of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and it was at UT that Burlage and Hayden became good friends. As the civil rights movement matured, its leaders recognized the importance of gaining voting rights in achieving full equality. Black women were among the earliest and most important leaders in the voting rights campaigns. Fannie Lou Hamer emerges out of the struggle as a pioneer for equal justice and political participation by black citizens. Hamer fought for voting rights and was a key organizer in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. A lifelong farmworker whose family was kicked off their plantation because of Hamer’s involvement in civil rights activities, Fannie Lou Hamer became a symbol of the sacrifices black women were willing to make for racial justice after she suffered a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in a Mississippi jail. Other key leaders in the struggle for voting rights in Mississippi include Unita Blackwell, Annie Belle Robinson Devine, Victoria Gray, and Winson Hudson and her sister, Dovie. Septima Poinsette Clark worked all of her adult life in activities that centered on desegregation and citizenship rights for black people. She organized citizenship schools to train black voters on Johns Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, and taught nonviolent tactics to civil rights activists at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and the SCLC office in Atlanta. At Highlander, Clark worked with an important white civil rights leader, Myles Horton. Horton’s Highlander Center became in the s an interracial oasis in a segregated South, where blacks and whites learned strategies and tactics for bringing about social change through nonviolent direct action. . Burlage, “Truths of the Heart,” in Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, by Constance Curry, Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Penny Patch, Theresa Del Pozzo, Sue Thrasher, Elaine DeLott Baker, Emmie Schrader Adams, and Casey Hayden (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), . . At least two biographies tell Hamer’s story, including Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Dutton Books, ); and Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ). . Jacqueline A. Rouse, “‘We Seek to Know. . . in Order to Speak the Truth’: Nurturing the Seeds of Discontent—Septima P. Clark and Participatory Leadership,” in Sisters in the Struggle, ed. Collier-Thomas and Franklin, –; Sandra B. Oldendorf, “The South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Schools, –,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, –; Clark, Echo in My Soul (New York: E. P. Dutton, ); Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, ), –.

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A few black women emerged as key figures in the militant black power movement. Their stories can tell us something about how young women became increasingly radicalized by their participation in the civil rights movement. Alabaman Angela Davis participated in civil rights demonstrations with her mother at an early age. During high school, she was active in “interracial study groups that were disbanded by the police.” Ultimately, she became an activist in the black power movement, and today she is a leading figure among African American intellectuals. By the mid-s, a number of southern black women were entering mainstream party politics. In  Texan Barbara Jordan ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Texas House of Representatives. She went on to win a seat in the state senate in , becoming the first black person to sit in the legislature since , at the end of Reconstruction. She was elected to the United States House of Representatives in  and remained there for three successive terms. Jordan is probably best known for her forceful, dramatic presence in the Watergate hearings in the United States Congress. In Georgia, wellknown civil rights activist Grace Towns Hamilton was elected to the state legislature. We need to know more about this first generation of civil rights activist women to enter politics. Did they bring a fresh approach to politics? How did their activist pasts shape their actions as legislators, and how did they transform the elected bodies they entered? As this historiographical overview suggests, most of what we know about women’s participation in the civil rights movement is fragmented and incomplete. Many have written autobiographies, leaving us valuable raw material for scholarship. Nonetheless, most of the scholarly study has been in the form of biographies of individual women. We need to examine the history of women’s civil rights activism through a wider lens. To drive this point home, I would like to focus on the lives of three black women and three white women. The three black women, Gloria Blackwell Rackley, Beatrice Taylor McKnight, and Victoria Way DeLee, hail from three different locales in South Carolina. The three southern white women are Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, and Sue Thrasher of Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee, respectively; all were active in the SNCC.

. Kathleen Thompson, “Angela Davis,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, ), :; Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, ). . Lorraine Nelson Spritzer and Jean B. Bergmark, Grace Towns Hamilton and the Politics of Southern Change (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ).

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Gloria Blackwell Rackley looms large in accounts of the Orangeburg movement, but little is known of this heroic struggle outside of South Carolina. Rackley, a native of Dillon, South Carolina, was born in , the only daughter and middle child of Harrison and Lurline McDonald Blackwell. Gloria’s brothers, Harrison and LeGrand, adored her, and she was given all of the advantages that her parents could afford in terms of education, travel, and introduction to like-minded people. Rackley’s family had a long history of social consciousness. Her mother’s ancestry included S. J. McDonald, a stalwart of the South Carolina NAACP. Her mother, an active community volunteer, was an important role model. Gloria’s parents instilled in her an understanding that she had an obligation to help others. Her childhood was filled with church and school activities, where she assumed leadership roles on a regular basis. After completing Claflin College in Orangeburg, Gloria accepted employment with the local public school system. She had married Jimmy Becknell, and they had three daughters. Later, she married Jack Rackley. The leadership experiences of her youth prepared Gloria Rackley for her work in the South Carolina civil rights movement during the heyday of protest marches, sit-ins, and mass arrests. The local media frequently covered her activities, for she upset people who felt that women—particularly black women—should be silent and passive. Her accomplishments include breaking the color barrier at the local hospital, winning a lawsuit that restored her teaching job after she had been fired for civil rights agitation, and working as an officer of the South Carolina NAACP. Not only did Rackley put her body on the line at civil rights demonstrations, but she also served as a role model for other women who were too frightened to challenge the traditional role that the community had set aside for female behavior. She encouraged the youth because she was a teacher standing up for her rights. She was jailed, maligned, ostracized, and fired from gainful employment because of her activities on behalf of others. In the long run, she has prospered because her dismissal from employment in Orangeburg opened wider horizons for her in the field of education; she has had a prosperous career as a college professor and administrator and is now retired. Late in life, she married Charles DeJournette and settled in Norfolk, Virginia, with him. . William C. Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs: South Carolina State College Students Protest, –,” South Carolina Historical Magazine  (October ): –; Rackley DeJournette, telephone interview with author, September , . . Rackley DeJournette interview; personal papers of Rackley DeJournette, Peachtree City, Ga.

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Another South Carolina woman activist whose story has not been told is Beatrice Taylor McKnight of Columbia. Like Rackley, McKnight is an example of one who devoted much of her life to improving race relations in her home community. Born in , she was orphaned at an early age; her mother, Minnie Fair Taylor, died when she was seven, and her father, Willie Taylor, passed away the following year. Nonetheless, her maternal grandmother, Sylvia Mack, and great-uncle, John Mack, stepped in and provided a family for Beatrice and her older brother, William. She had a normal childhood for black Columbians, attending church, singing in the church choir, participating in sports, and attending all-black public schools. After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in , Beatrice attended Allen University, a historically black college in Columbia, for one year. She enjoyed the atmosphere at Allen, where she was exposed to students from other regions of the country and the Caribbean, to distinguished speakers in the required chapel services, and to members of the national office of the NAACP invited to speak on the campus. After leaving Allen, Beatrice Taylor married Alfred McKnight, and the couple had three children. After the births of her children, McKnight began working full-time with the Human Resources Development Commission in Columbia, one of the programs funded by the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity. A neighborhood worker with this agency for four years, McKnight organized various community improvement projects, such as helping communities secure water and sewer services from the city of Columbia, helping eligible people apply for Social Security, getting community roads paved, and assisting disadvantaged people in finding legal assistance. She also organized a grassroots protest in which tenants in the Camp Fornance area of Columbia placed their rent payments into an escrow account until their landlords improved the property. Later, McKnight worked as a parish visitor for the Presbyterian Church, USA. She describes her work as “getting resources for people, whatever they were in need of.” She moved on to a stint as a case manager with the Big Brothers and Sisters agency, interviewing the children and the volunteers and ensuring that the children received all the help that they could get from these supportive relationships. In , McKnight accepted a position with the Columbia Urban League, where she is still employed today. She began as a family counselor, working with troubled youth and their parents to provide alternatives to incarceration and encouraging students who were potential high school dropouts. She is now a project director for the Columbia Urban League’s “Safe Schools, Healthy Students” program, which coordinates supportive programs and activities for students in Richland County School District no. .

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McKnight’s professional career often overlapped with her volunteer activities. At some point in the s, she began to take an interest in community improvement activities. She attended meetings of the Richland County Citizens Committee (RCCC) in Columbia. This organization was a branch of the South Carolina Citizens Committee (SCCC), which was founded in  as a companion organization to the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP (organized in ). Modjeska Monteith Simkins, an early officer in the SCCC, explains its genesis: The Citizens Committee formed a kind of “buffer zone” between the vicious power structure in the state that was against the NAACP because of advances it might bring in political action in favor of the Negro people. . . . The Citizens Committee was organized as a kind of offset NAACP with the main objective being to raise funds that could be funneled into the NAACP treasury to help carry on the federal cases that were being pursued at that time in South Carolina.

It was at the meetings of the RCCC that McKnight met and worked with Modjeska Monteith Simkins; they grew close, for they were kindred spirits, each outspoken and confrontational in their manner of communication. Neither could have known in the early years that their bond would last until Simkins died in , at age ninety-two. They came to depend on each other for companionship, support and direction, and mutual friendship. The RCCC carried out a number of projects in the years between the s and s, when it ceased to function as a vibrant organization. McKnight was in the middle of all these activities, offering support in any way that she could. At one time, she was the organization’s secretary. Perhaps the RCCC’s greatest accomplishment was the integration of the Columbia City Schools. South Carolina was the last of the southern states to integrate its public schools. A group of black Charleston citizens sought to break the barriers of segregation in the public schools. Next, it was the black citizens of Columbia who decided to reform their schools. The RCCC took the initiative in organizing students for integration when no one else was interested in doing the legwork. McKnight and other RCCC volunteers telephoned parents, arranged meetings, wrote letters, made telephone calls, and recruited students to test the waters. Their efforts were successful as black students transferred into previously all-white public schools with little harassment. . McKnight, interview by author, Columbia, S.C., October , ; Simkins, interview by author, Columbia, S.C., July , ; Woods Aba-Mecha, “Black Woman Activist,” –.

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McKnight went on to help integrate the Valley Park (later named Martin Luther King Jr. Park) recreational facilities, founded an organization to assist the needy in getting welfare benefits from the state of South Carolina, assisted in voter registration, and helped to carry out numerous projects on behalf of black people in South Carolina. In recent years, she has worked extensively with the Columbia branch of the NAACP, serving as treasurer for more than a decade. Another South Carolina native whose work has been significant is Victoria Way DeLee of Ridgeville. DeLee, born in , was raised in her grandmother’s home in an environment where religion and strict discipline were very important. In rural Ridgeville, working in the fields was a way of life for most black people, and DeLee was no exception. Victoria recalls that she grew up in a racially oppressive environment. She remembers an incident in which she was severely punished for talking back to a white landlord in whose field she was picking cotton. The landlord hit her in the head until she fell down, and then he ordered DeLee’s grandmother to whip her. Later, Victoria’s grandmother explained that if she had not followed the man’s instruction, the young girl might have been killed. This traumatic experience and other instances of racial injustice convinced her that she had to work hard as an adult in order to “fix things.” In , at age twenty-two, she obtained her voter registration certificate with some difficulty, and afterward, she was tenacious in her efforts to get other blacks registered. She transported black people to the polls and recruited voter registration workers. At this time, she was working with South Carolina NAACP’s field secretary, the Reverend Isaiah DeQuincey Newman. NAACP activity in the Ridgeville area upset local racists. Local whites called a White Citizens Council meeting at Ridgeville Elementary School to request that South Carolina governor George B. Timmerman Jr. put an end to NAACP activity in the state. Reaction in Ridgeville was mirrored all over the South: “After the Brown decision, The NAACP was being hounded all across the South by officeholders who bitterly resented the Supreme Court’s legal sanction of integration in southern public schools.” Attempts at official repression did not deter DeLee and those working with her from bringing about change in Dorchester County. Part of her . McKnight, interview by author, Columbia, S.C., September , October , ; “Beatrice McKnight: Taking a No-Nonsense Approach to Civil Rights and Human Services,” Carolina Panorama : (March –, ). . Rosetta E. Ross, “The Life and Work of Victoria Way DeLee: A Study of Transformative Ethical Practices” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, ). . Woods Aba-Mecha, “Black Woman Activist,” .

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effective counteraction to local white resistance was taking two carloads (twenty people) to the Justice Department in Washington to seek help from the federal government. Her efforts resulted in federal personnel being sent to oversee voter registration in three South Carolina counties, including her home county of Dorchester. DeLee also cofounded the Dorchester Voter’s League that coordinated voter registration and other county civil rights activities. In , DeLee’s family initiated desegregation of the Dorchester District  schools when two of their children enrolled in previously all-white schools. Two years later, the DeLees led the list of plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to completely desegregate the district’s schools. This attempt to desegregate the public schools of Dorchester took five years of court battles and planning. During this time, the DeLee home was first shot into and later burned to the ground by arsonists. Nonetheless, the DeLee family persevered with their desegregation campaign, leading demonstrations and meeting with school officials. Their campaign broadened to include Native Americans of the area who were forced to attend a separate county school. Eventually, blacks and Native Americans entered the previously all-white schools. In the case of women, the legacy of slavery and of black women’s work for white women as domestics made it extremely difficult, almost impossible, for the average southern black woman and southern white woman to respect each other and feel a bond of sisterhood. In studies of the interactions between black and white southern women, Dolores Janiewski has assessed the difficulties involved in their ability to find common ground: The intangible benefits of white supremacy’s pseudo-homage to white womanhood remained deeply entrenched in these women’s notions of selfrespect and respectability. Taught to view themselves as “lady-like” when they refrained from heavy labor but to call black women “lazy” when they made the same claims, these women resisted any imputation of “social equality” which would place them on the same level with those they regarded as unclean, immoral and unlike themselves. Black women’s demands for equal treatment threatened white women’s deeply held beliefs in a natural God-given order that established their moral as well as economic superiority over their black co-workers.

Black women, too, found it hard to relate to white women as equals. As Janiewski puts it: . Ross, “Life and Work of DeLee.” . Janiewski, “Sisters under Their Skin: Southern Working Women, –,” in Sex, Race, and the Role of Women in the South, ed. Joanne V. Hawks and Sheila L. Skemp (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –.

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They had learned that the best way to deal with white people was to stay away from them, to mistrust their motives, but to respect their power. The tensions of life outside the factory, epitomized by their work as servants in white households, mirrored the lessons learned inside. Whether working in the fields, in white households, in the factory, or in white-dominated organizations, black women early learned similar lessons. While their labor might ease white women’s responsibilities for household labor, a product of unequal relations between the sexes, they could expect no reciprocity from white women. Whatever unity or “oneness” might emerge between white and black women would be set on white women’s terms.

Another factor that adds difficulty to racial harmony between black and white southern women is the residual anger caused by southern white males’ mistreatment of black women during slavery and after. The long history of whites’ discrimination against and exploitation of black women workers made it difficult for most women to build bridges across racial lines. Nonetheless, some women did cross these racial boundaries to work together for racial and economic justice. Three white southern women whose civil rights work is relatively unknown are Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, and Sue Thrasher. Like the black women described earlier, they made important contributions to the civil rights movement in the South, and their work has gone largely unheralded by writers of civil rights history. Joan C. Browning, a native of Wheeler County, in southern Georgia, was born into a large, close-knit family that consisted of five sons and three daughters. Within commuting distance of Brunswick, Georgia, her community was home to several generations of her father’s family members. In Wheeler County, segregation was strictly enforced. Browning’s mother was from northwestern Georgia, the granddaughter of a Baptist minister and a “hillbilly teacher.” Her parents met at a cotton mill in Macon, where both worked. They lived with her father’s sister and brother-in-law until they were able to buy their own fifty-five-acre farm with a New Deal loan. Browning was reared in a secure environment and a stable home, and her family was economically better off than many in the poor rural community. Joan grew up with such amenities as a telephone and books. Truck farming eventually came to be the basis of the family’s livelihood in an area where farming was the basic form of employment. Browning’s secure childhood environment gave her a good self-image in a largely isolated rural area. In school, she was an exceptional student, skipping seventh grade and graduating from high school at age sixteen. Browning . Ibid., .

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grew up in a family that sheltered her from harsh reality but also in a protective community that operated like an extended family. At the early age of ten, she joined Scotland Methodist Church. The community was ultraconservative, frowning upon the opening of a local drive-in theater, but her open-minded minister loaded the youth in his car and carried them there. Because there were no black families nearby, she was not exposed to the racism that was everyday life for most black southern Georgians. In her autobiographical essay, she states: “Growing up, I do not recall a single incident, or report of an incident, or even rumor or gossip about an incident, involving racial animosity. Racial segregation in the Telfair County of my youth was rigid and unchallenged, yet I was not aware that segregation was violently enforced.” Browning recalls working alongside black laborers in the cotton field where she took pride in the amount of cotton that she could pick. Browning attended the Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) at Milledgeville. It was there that she became involved in the civil rights movement. Through a friendship with a black minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the Reverend Mincey, whose church was across the street from her college, she became acquainted with the black community. She attended services at Mincey’s church occasionally. As with other youth who became civil right workers, Joan participated in YWCA activities and programs sponsored by the Methodist Wesley Foundation. Her true introduction to white Georgia’s adherence to a strict racial caste system came when she and her friend Faye Powell, student president of the Wesley Foundation, accepted an invitation from the Reverend Mincey to give a program for his church’s Youth League. When word of their decision reached the college’s president, he requested that the girls turn down the minister’s invitation because the president had been told that violence would ensue if the girls participated in Christian work at a black church. This incident took place in , at the same time that Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes were entering the University of Georgia at Athens under court order. Browning had worked with other students in getting  students to sign a petition “asking that the free public schools not be closed to avoid integration.” Georgia College’s dean and president went further and ordered Joan and Faye to stop attending the black church services, which the college president considered to be a dangerous activity. Browning was determined to participate in interracial activities and ignored his instructions. Upon receiving an . Browning, “Shiloh Witness,” in Deep in Our Hearts, by Curry et al., . . Ibid., .

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order from college officials not to attend an interracial Christian student seminar, being held at Paine College, a black college in Augusta, she circumvented their authority by pretending to go home with Faye for the weekend. The two young women attended the meeting and decided that they would take part in the picketing of downtown stores in Augusta that afternoon. This decision changed Browning’s life. When she returned to college, she was told that she “was not welcome back at GSCW, that if I tried to return I would be expelled and my permanent record would be blemished, and that I would not receive any further financial assistance. And if I kept quiet the remainder of the quarter and left voluntarily, nothing on my record would prohibit my transfer to another college. I went quietly.” Browning may have left GSCW quietly, but she did not turn her back on the civil rights movement. She had met Constance Curry at the Paine College conference and learned about the National Student Association’s Southern Student Human Relations Project and the Southern Student Seminar. So in , Joan C. Browning, eighteen years old and dismissed from college in her junior year for supporting the civil rights movement, headed for Atlanta where she immersed herself in the Methodist Church and civil rights activities. Curry introduced her to other white activists, among them Casey Hayden and the SNCC’s godmother, Ella Baker, and to the SNCC. While working full-time in the Emory University library in order to support herself, Browning volunteered as a clerical worker in the SNCC office on Auburn Avenue along with James Forman, executive secretary; Julian Bond, writer; and Norma Collins, the office manager. Eager to play an important role, Browning volunteered to be one of the four whites to participate in the SNCC’s Albany Freedom Ride. This participation catapulted her into the eyes of the media, for she was arrested, “the only white woman on the Freedom Ride or in the Albany Movement in jail during that week and a half.” Joan Browning’s participation in the Albany movement brought a devastating reversal to her life, for her family thoroughly disapproved of her participation in the civil rights activities. Her mother feared that their home community would retaliate against their family if the family supported Joan in any way. Her brother Wayne was so disgusted by her actions that he told their mother that Joan should remain in jail. She was asked not to return home, even for a visit. This rejection was painful for Joan at that time, and is still painful, for she has never fully reestablished the family ties that she once held. In reading Browning’s autobiographical essay, one finds a number of . Ibid., . . Ibid., .

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whites in Atlanta, particularly those connected to Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, who were supportive of integration. Browning moved within a well-read, educated community that was interracial and progressive. Her Christian beliefs moved her to action on behalf of the oppressed black people; for this, she suffered, losing both her college education and her family’s support. She remained active, nonetheless, and made an important contribution to southern history. Dorothy Dawson Burlage was born in San Antonio in  into an educated and prosperous family. She had only one sibling, a brother. Both her mother and her father were college graduates, and the family enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle until the death of Dorothy’s father when she was eight years old. At that point, her mother became the family’s breadwinner and worried regularly about their financial stability. In the Dawson home, a well-stocked library afforded the children a range of readings on various subjects, and the Dawson children were encouraged to think for themselves. At the same time, the church encouraged conformity to the Jim Crow system. Like other southern women activists, Burlage was raised in the Christian church. She heard sermons professing that the Bible mandated segregation and that the Lord had ordained black people to be “hewers of wood and carriers of water.” This was the church’s justification for southern society’s mistreatment of black people. In the years surrounding the passage of federal legislation outlawing segregation, many white southern churches became more adamant in their support of segregation. Yet Burlage believed that segregation was a violation of Christian principles. Burlage’s recollections of her college years at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia are filled with references to the double life that she led. Her Christian beliefs made her question the validity of legal segregation, and she decided to do something about it. She wrote a controversial paper defending school integration, which set her apart from her classmates who were defending segregation. She also attended an interracial meeting of the National Student Association, an action that left her feeling “like a traitor.” Burlage transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, which provided further growth for her. There she was exposed to people who were progressive in their thinking on the topic of integration. Her Christian conscience kept her from maintaining membership in her “white-only” sorority. She met Robert Burlage, whom she later married. He was progressive in his . Ibid., –. . Burlage, “Truths of the Heart,” in Deep in Our Hearts, by Curry et al., . . Ibid., .

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thinking and was involved in interracial activities. His influence helped her to move away from traditional perspectives on race, perspectives that were ingrained in her from her early childhood. Like other southern activists, the YWCA was an important training ground for Burlage. Its interracial activities exposed her to black people who were peers and mentors. As with Joan Browning, Dorothy Dawson’s family relationships suffered as a result of her association with black people. Her grandmother, the beloved matriarch of the family, scorned her granddaughter for choosing to live in an interracial dormitory. Dawson has stated that her civil rights activities were intolerable to her family: “This split over beliefs about segregation was the beginning of a -year period in which I would see little of my family. The rift was extremely painful for me, but I was adamant in my belief that the South must change. My beliefs were not based on a missionary spirit of ‘saving’ blacks, but on my conviction that segregation was a toxic presence in the South for all of us.” Dawson left the South for a position with the YWCA in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and later moved on to Harvard Divinity School. The third white southern activist whom I will discuss at length is Sue Thrasher of Savannah, Tennessee. Sue was raised in a family of four children with working-class parents who struggled to give their children the best life that they could afford. Her father was a carpenter and farmer, and her mother a factory worker. The coming of World War II improved the family’s financial condition because her father found work at the federal government’s nuclear weapons research and production facility at Oak Ridge while her mother was employed as a driver for the army. Sue lived in a segregated world for the first twenty years of her life. After she left home to attend college, she became aware of the civil rights movement. In Jackson, Tennessee, at Lambuth College, Sue attended her first interracial gathering, and she became sympathetic to blacks who were campaigning for their rights. Thrasher’s Christian background had led her to believe that social justice was important. At college she majored in religion, looking forward to a career in religious education. Her Methodist background had prepared her to challenge the status quo. Scarrit College, the Methodist school to which Sue transferred, was being integrated in the early s. At Scarrit, Thrasher also met students from various nations and many of the leaders of the student movement, including John Lewis, Bernard and Colia Lafayette, and Lester McKinney. After attending a meeting organized by the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, the local affiliate of the SCLC, Thrasher no longer felt . Ibid., , –.

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that she could watch the movement from the sidelines. She became actively involved with the SNCC and the Nashville Christian Leadership Council. Joining the civil rights movement was no easy decision for southern whites because those who joined the protest lines were vilified, harassed, and persecuted. The harassment often extended to the families of white civil rights workers, so Thrasher initially preferred to work behind the scenes for the protection of her family. Thrasher has explained: “Other white students were involved in the Nashville sit-in movement earlier who were much braver. Paul LaPrad and Candie Carawan, both white exchange students at Fisk University, were active participants in the lunch counter protest. The counter demonstrators quickly developed a special venom for the whites who dared to show their solidarity, and Paul LaPrad suffered the unhappy fate of having lit cigarettes ground into his back.” The more she became involved in the movement, the easier it became for her to speak out. There were incidents when she felt the need to defend black people who were being mistreated by white southerners. She also became more comfortable working with black people on an equal basis. Sue’s work led to her participation in the Southern Student Organizing Committee. She was elected secretary at its organizing meeting. She continued to play a major role in organizing white students to participate in civil rights campaigns. As with her colleagues Joan C. Browning and Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Sue Thrasher is a model of southern white womanhood, yet she chose to challenge traditional roles in order to achieve racial justice. Patterns emerge from the study of the experiences of these six southern civil rights workers. Spiritual convictions played a central role in the decisions made by all six to participate in the movement. Because the African American church took such a major role in leadership of the southern movement, with both the NAACP and the SCLC, it provided an avenue for black women to become involved. The white churches were, for the most part, averse to the direct-action campaigns, but many of the white southerners who became part of the movement were people with deep spiritual convictions: some were clergy; some were congregation leaders, choir members, and ushers; and others were just plain parishioners. These church members took their religion seriously and envisioned their reform work in civil rights as an extension of their religious obligation to serve their fellowman. . Thrasher, “Circle of Trust,” in Deep in Our Hearts, by Curry et al., , –. . Jean E. Friedman, “Women’s History and the Revision of Southern History,” in Sex, Race, and Women, ed. Hawks and Skemp, ; Anne Firor Scott, “Historians Construct the Southern Woman,” in Sex, Race, and Women, ed. Hawks and Skemp, –.

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All six women testified to the impact of the church on their lives and their involvement in their churches’ activities from an early age. Gloria Rackley’s maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister. Her mother was the church musician, and she immersed her daughter deeply in church activities. Rackley has described herself as having “strong, innate ties in the Methodist church” from her youth. In her early years, she attended national and international Methodist youth meetings. By the time she entered college at age sixteen, she was president of the state Methodist Youth Fellowship for South Carolina, and she attended a Methodist college, Claflin College in Orangeburg. Because she worked so closely with church activities, Rackley joined the Oxford Club, an organization for aspiring ministers. Although the group was primarily male, she felt accepted because she was a Methodist youth organizer. Rackley remembers that the church was central in her civil rights activities and that Trinity United Methodist Church was the headquarters for the Orangeburg movement. In Orangeburg, the protestors always prayed before they went out on a demonstration, and two of the most important local leaders were the Reverend Isaiah DeQuincey Newman and the Reverend Matthew McCollom, both leaders of the South Carolina NAACP. McKnight’s activities in the AME Church also drew her into civil rights activity. McKnight explains that the meetings of the RCCC and NAACP began and ended with prayer “in the old days.” She notes that this pattern is no longer dominant. The meeting places of the Richland County Citizens Committee (no longer functioning) and the Columbia branch of the NAACP were then, and are now, the churches in the local community. For example, in a recent election of officers for the Columbia branch of the NAACP, McKnight explained to me that she could recognize the representation of the various churches as the membership filed in to vote. She also stated that many of the people running for office had appealed to various churches for support. Typically, the recruitment for the NAACP is done informally at the local churches, as well as at other venues frequented by the black community. For black women, the fact that family-oriented participation was encouraged and valued helped get them involved. The extended family was a necessity during slavery times, for blacks had no power to keep a nuclear family intact. The kin networks in black communities remain very strong, even to the present. For example, when blacks left rural areas to move to cities, they often lodged with relatives in order to get an introduction to the towns . Rackley DeJournette, interview. . McKnight, interview, September , .

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and cities. Particularly in the migration from the South to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, family members joined each other in their homes until they could afford to purchase or rent their own homes. Many also stayed with relatives to attend high schools when their homes were in areas where there were no high schools. In my family, for example, my mother and her siblings came from the rural area of lower Richland County to complete high school in Columbia, and they all resided with relatives during the week and went home on the weekends. A similar situation existed with my father’s family, who is from the same community. When they went to find employment in cities, they also boarded initially with relatives. The family networks that facilitated black migration also supported civil rights organizing. Black women worked closely with their families and close friends in the movement, and examples can be found easily among the three black women I have examined here. Gloria Rackley worked closely with her friend Grace Brooks Palmer and her daughters, Jamelle and Lurma. They all picketed together. She explains: “I would take a carload of children, Charles Thomas’ children, my children and others” to protests. Rackley’s youngest daughter, Lurma, was arrested so often that she was sentenced to reform school, although the family was able to have the sentence suspended. Gloria and her daughter Jamelle sued the Orangeburg hospital for discrimination and won their lawsuit, Rackley v. Tri-County Hospital, which integrated the facilities. Rackley had refused to sit in an area that was reserved for blacks who waited to be seen by the medical staff. She has explained: They told me to sit on the Coca-Cola crates in the hall. Jamelle had broken her finger. There was an area next to a soda machine where blacks were supposed to sit. Other black people were sitting there, but I went to the “real” waiting room. Two great big plainclothes people had motioned for me to come out. They said, “There’s a waiting room for you.” I said, “I have found a waiting room.” . . . They opened the door, so I could get into the plain car. A police car escort was in the front and another on the back. I was in the middle car.

Another South Carolinian, Modjeska Simkins, worked closely with her relatives in reform activities. As a child, she had attended NAACP meetings with her mother and maternal aunts, who were very active with the Columbia NAACP and very outspoken. Later, she worked alongside her sister, Rebecca Monteith, in many of the projects, and they helped Rebecca’s daughter, Henri Monteith, integrate the University of South Carolina. Simkins became . Rackley DeJournette, interview.

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a close friend to Beatrice McKnight because of their work in civil rights activities. Beatrice McKnight also speaks of a neighbor and close friend, Deloris Frazier, with whom she attended meetings and picketed. In Ridgeville, South Carolina, Victoria Way DeLee and her children were active together in civil rights activities, including integrating the schools. Not all blacks were supportive of women’s leadership in the movement. Another common experience shared by the black and white women who were active in civil rights was their ostracism and condemnation by friends and sometimes family. Often, jobs were lost and the local newspapers ridiculed the women’s activities. Septima P. Clark explains that black teachers were afraid to be seen with her: But you know the black teachers were afraid of me, terribly afraid. They would call my house and say, “I’m sorry.” I said, “Don’t tell it to me. Tell it to that superintendent downtown.” But you know they weren’t going to do that. Then the Afro-American had an article and had it in the paper about my being dismissed and about my sorority not saying anything or doing anything. Then the basileus of the sorority was so afraid that she read the article to the group. A lot of the little things they said, she wrote in a letter to me to let me know that there were some groups who didn’t want to be associated with me, a lot of things. But I considered that I had been in that organization before many of them and if I wanted to, I’d stay in. . . . Because some of the women who gave me the testimonial [in ], well when it was time to take the pictures, they were afraid. They wouldn’t come. There were only three of them that stood. . . . But they were really afraid.

Clark also recalls that her brother was upset with her for not resigning when she knew that she was going to be fired. She explained to him: “If I had resigned, I wouldn’t have a chance to fight it, you know, because that means that you give up. But when you don’t give up, you have a chance to come back.” Likewise, Gloria Rackley recalls that she was vilified in the newspapers with descriptions such as “dangerously wild.” There were people in the Orangeburg community who stayed away from her out of fear of being associated with her activities. In the letter that she received when she was fired from her teaching job, the superintendent stated that she was “rabid in her zeal for social change and was unfit to be a teacher.” At one point, when . Simkins, interview by author, Columbia, S.C., September , ; McKnight, interview, September , . . Septima P. Clark, interview by Grace Jordan McFadden, n.p., February , .

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Rackley demanded equal time on a radio show to give her point of view, her principal cautioned her with this advice, “Better to throw a brick and hide your hand.” Like Clark, the high price Rackley paid was losing her employment as a public school teacher; she also explains that her husband was targeted, and his contract as a professor at South Carolina State College was not renewed. Within her family, her father accepted his daughter’s activities, but her mother worried about her daughter’s well-being; she was also critical of Rackley’s heavy involvement and that of her grandchildren. She felt that her daughter should not be on the front lines. White southern members of the movement suffered alienation from loved ones to a greater extent than their black counterparts, for many of their families rejected them completely, not wanting them to come home for a visit. Joan C. Browning has described her alienation and isolation from her people in the following manner: “I stumbled innocently, unaware, across southern racism’s dividing line. . . . As I crossed that racial line, it seemed that an invisible but powerful force snatched my white-world passport. The personal history I was writing made me an outcast in white southern society, while my white skin sometimes separated me from black people. I became, at once, racially homeless.” Another aspect of the civil rights movement that was very real was the fear of bodily harm and possibly even death that many women felt, especially the young women. The brutal nature of southern society, with its legacy from the patrol system of slavery, when all whites had power over all blacks, reached its zenith in the violence that attended the civil rights activities, the freedom rides, the picketing, and the sit-ins. Dorothy Dawson Burlage describes many incidents where her life might have been in danger, including a visit to segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox’s restaurant in the Atlanta area: One time I went to a restaurant in the white working-class outskirts of Atlanta, the Pickrick, owned by Lester Maddox, known at the time as a fervent segregationist. I was in an interracial group with Cordell Reagon (black) and Bob Zellner (white). We had agreed that we would sit down and leave, if asked, without protest. We were seated, but were quickly chased out by women battering us with their pocketbooks, a man wielding an ax handle, and Lester Maddox yelling, “Get out of here!” Bob said he saw Maddox brandishing a gun, but I was already running to the car by then. We all made it to safety. . Rackley DeJournette, interview. . Browning, “Shiloh Witness,” . . Burlage, “Truths of the Heart,” .

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Conclusions In closing, the legacies of the southern past have put enormous stumbling blocks on the path of sisterhood for southern women of both races. Those women who worked in the civil rights movement, which was an interracial undertaking, were able to overcome this southern legacy of injustice well enough to work together for social change, no matter how difficult conditions might have been. They provide an example for us of the possibilities for the future. These white women and black women worked together to create a better society for the next generation. It was not easy, for they were strangers to each other, but they were fighting for common ground. They left a legacy for us that we should appreciate and that we should imitate in terms of working interracially to solve many of the pressing problems of today’s society. The world that we confront today is different from the world of segregation and isolation. It will take a united front to rid our society of the problems that beset us. We cannot operate in isolation from each other. By focusing on the South, the literal and spiritual homeland of black Americans, this essay attempts to record some of the civil rights stories and to analyze the role of southern women in this transformation called the civil rights movement.

s “Separate but Equal” Case Law and the Higher Education of Women in the Twenty-First-Century South my hompson candless

Conceptions of gender and race are intricately interwoven in southern history, and this interrelationship is crucial to understanding the history of higher education of women in the region. From the establishment of the first colleges for women in the nineteenth century to the integration battles of the twentieth century to the affirmative action debates of the contemporary South, regional stereotypes of gender and race have shaped academic programs, student culture, and institutional policy. Consequently, there are numerous parallels in regional efforts to provide educational equity for blacks and for women. Although the phrase “separate but equal” originated with efforts to segregate whites from people of color in public accommodations, the issues raised by Plessy v. Ferguson () and later by Brown v. Board of Education ( and ) equally apply to developments in the higher education of women in the region. The majority of colleges for women and for African Americans were founded in the nineteenth century, at a time when most southern institutions of higher education limited their admissions to white males. Although this separate status was born of necessity, many supporters of single-gender and single-race schools argued that segregation was not necessarily detrimental to women or to blacks. As Christie Anne Farnham has shown in her examination of higher education in the antebellum South, separatism “embraced within its rhetorical construction an increase in female autonomy, which provided the basis for strategies to renegotiate the boundaries that prevailed between the sexes.” Similarly, Linda Perkins in her study of black women’s education has noted that African American institutions not only 

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provided the proverbial room of one’s own for women students, but also provided employment opportunities for women faculty and staff, opportunities typically not available for women (of any race) at predominantly white institutions. By the first decades of the twentieth century, however, it was clear that “separate” did not mean “equal” educational opportunities for white or black women. In , only five southern women’s colleges—Agnes Scott, Converse, Florida State, Goucher, and Randolph-Macon—were able to meet the criteria for accreditation established by the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States. Educational options were even more limited for African American women in the region. Segregated school systems made it difficult for them to obtain adequate schooling and liberal arts degrees close to home. As late as , more than  percent of students in black public and private institutions of higher education in the South were enrolled in precollegiate programs. It was not until the s that philanthropic agencies and state legislators began “to give serious attention to plans for the systematic and rational improvement of Negro education all along the line.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the first organization to challenge the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the courts. Charles Hamilton Houston, an African American attorney, believed that the adverse effects of racial segregation could best be demonstrated in the sphere of public education. In the pathbreaking Supreme Court case of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri et al. (), Houston argued that his client, Lloyd Gaines, should have the same opportunity to attend law school in his home state of Missouri as a white resident. Gaines had received his B.A. degree in  from Lincoln University, a publicly supported college for blacks. Because Missouri

. Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, ), ; Perkins, “Education,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), :–. . “Minimum College Requirements Adopted by the Executive Committee of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States,” reprinted in Meredith College Quarterly Bulletin : (November ): –; see also Amy Thompson McCandless, The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), –, for information on women’s higher education in the Progressive Era; Dwight Oliver Holmes, The Evolution of the Negro College (New York: American Missionary Society Press, ), –.

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did not have a law school for blacks, Gaines applied for admission to the allwhite University of Missouri. The registrar referred him to the Revised Statutes of Missouri () that provided tuition for blacks to “take any course or to study any subjects provided for at the state university of Missouri . . . which are not taught at the Lincoln university.” Gaines sued, contending that this provision denied him equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The state court responded that Gaines was indeed provided “equal” opportunity for a legal education because Missouri would pay his fees at the Universities of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, or Illinois, all of which admitted “non-resident Negroes” and offered a “sound, comprehensive, valuable legal education.” The United States Supreme Court retorted that the question was not what other states provided, but what Missouri provided: “The admissibility of laws separating the races in the enjoyment of privileges afforded by the State rests wholly upon the equality of the privileges which the laws give to the separated groups within the State.” In answer to the state’s assertion that Missouri did not need to establish a law school for blacks because no blacks had expressed an interest in one until Gaines, the justices replied that Gaines as an individual was “entitled to the equal protection of the laws, and the State was bound to furnish him within its borders facilities for legal education, substantially equal to those which the State there afforded for persons of the white race, whether or not other Negroes sought the same opportunity.” Although the Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the state court, it did not require the University of Missouri to admit Gaines. Instead, the state legislature approved funds to establish a law school at Lincoln University. Gaines “mysteriously disappeared before the mandate was issued.” Subsequent legal challenges to Plessy v. Ferguson found that segregated facilities established to avoid integration of the white flagship universities were inevitably unequal. In Sweatt v. Painter et al. (), the University of Texas was forced to admit blacks to its professional and graduate schools. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (), the Court required integrated institutions to provide the same facilities and opportunities for black students as for white students. Brown et al. v. Board of Educa. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri et al.,  U.S.  (). . Ibid.; “The Role of the Negro in Missouri History: Missouri Negroes between the Two World Wars, –,” in Office Manual, State of Missouri, –, available on-line at http://www.umsl.edu/services/library/blackstudies/betwww.htm.

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tion of Topeka et al. () went even further. The justices argued that public education must be examined “in the light of its full development and its present place in American life. . . . Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.” After looking at cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, the Court concluded “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The civil rights and women’s movements of the s and s expanded the discussion of educational equity to encompass gender as well as race. The Civil Rights Act of  prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, or sex. But, like the Equal Pay Act of , it allowed discrimination based on sex (but not race) if it were “a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business enterprise.” Similarly, Title IX of the Education Act amendments of , which prohibited discriminatory admissions policies at schools receiving federal funds, included several significant exclusions: “certain religious institutions, elementary and secondary schools, military institutions, and undergraduate institutions that have been traditionally and continually single-sex from their inception.” Both the language and the enforcement of these civil rights measures indicated that the courts viewed racial discrimination as more pernicious than gender discrimination. Whereas in racial matters separate could never be equal, gender inequities in education could be justified depending on the context. These legal distinctions between race and gender would be challenged in the debates over coeducation at Mississippi University for Women (MUW), Texas Woman’s University (TWU), the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), and the Citadel. In July , the United States Supreme Court ruled in Mississippi University et al. v. Hogan that the single-gender admissions policy of the Mississippi University for Women School of Nursing violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiff, Joe Hogan, was working as a registered nurse in a medical center in Columbus, Mississippi, when he applied for admission to the School of Nursing at MUW. The women’s college was located in Columbus, while the state’s coeducational nursing programs were a considerable distance from his work. When Hogan was not admitted because of his sex, he sued. His attorney, William Colom, was an . Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al.,  U.S.  (). . Kristin S. Caplice, “The Case for Public Single-Sex Education,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy : (fall ): .

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African American who had been referred to him by the American Civil Liberties Union. The district court, denying Hogan preliminary injunctive relief, argued that the “maintenance of MUW as a single-sex school [bore] a rational relationship to the State’s legitimate interest ‘in providing the greatest practical range of educational opportunities for its female student population’” and that single-gender education was “consistent with a respected, though by no means universally accepted educational theory that single-sex education affords unique benefits to students.” When the court of appeals reversed the district court’s ruling, Hogan’s lawyer filed for an injunction that required the university to admit him immediately. In August , Hogan became the first male student in the “W’s” ninety-seven-year history. An article in the campus newspaper, the Spectator, assured students that the decision affected “only. . . Hogan; it is not a mandate for the W to admit all qualified male applicants. Neither does it require that the state of Mississippi establish an all-male university to counter-balance the W.” The university’s lawyers applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. Mississippi contended that Congress had exempted schools that had historically been single sex from its gender-discrimination prohibition of Title IX. Rejecting this argument, the court of appeals stated that under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could not grant states the right to violate the amendment. Nor would the court accept MUW’s claim that its admissions policy compensated for earlier discrimination against women, contending that such a policy only perpetuated gender stereotypes of nursing as a woman’s profession. Hogan’s suit against MUW elicited considerable debate. In a letter to the McComb Enterprise Journal copied to the Spectator, seven alumnae warned that the admission of men “would destroy [MUW’s] particular identity and purpose.” They scoffed at Hogan’s claim that he had a right to attend any public institution for which he was qualified. To begin with, they countered, he was  qualified because he was a male. It would be one thing if no coeducational colleges in Mississippi offered baccalaureate degrees in nursing, but this was not the case. It was unfortunate for Hogan that they were not nearby, but the lack of a coeducational institution in Columbus was hardly . Mississippi University for Women et al. v. Hogan,  U.S.  (), –; Suzanne Monk, “First Male Enrolls for MUW Credit,” Spectator (student newspaper of MUW), September , . . Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, –; Monk, “First Male Enrolls.” . Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, –.

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unconstitutional. “No school in the state,” the women noted, “offers a guarantee that local residents will not have to move to get the course of study they want.” The alumnae also defended the existence of single-sex schools and organizations: “To do away with all sex indentity [sic] means equal injustice instead of equal rights.” The student reaction was equally negative. One sophomore thought the suit would lead people “to make fun of the school. Now it’s MUW and M.” Casting aspersions on Hogan’s masculinity, she noted that he could not even register by himself: “All of the freshmen went through by themselves, but he had to have his lawyer . . . with him.” Nursing students, she continued, had to “sponge bathe each other,” and having a man there made them uncomfortable. They would “have to sponge male patients” in the real world, but she saw no reason they had “to do it at The W.” Another student confessed that she found Hogan’s enrollment “unnatural.” Yet another said she was “afraid this will lead to the changing of the complexion of the campus.” Although some acknowledged the justice of his case, most wished Hogan had not sought admission to MUW. The United States Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the court of appeals. Although Justice Sandra O’Connor in delivering the opinion of the Court interpreted the case narrowly and insisted that the ruling applied only to MUW’s School of Nursing, Justice Powell, in his dissent, raised questions about the breadth of the Court’s decision. “It seems to me,” Powell wrote, “that in fact the issue properly before us is the single-sex policy of the University.” Not wishing to face additional lawsuits, MUW decided to open all of its programs to men. Ironically, Joe Hogan was not on campus to savor his victory. Citing pressures at work, Hogan withdrew from the university three months after his court-ordered admission in August . His midterm departure provoked additional criticism. Summer Smith, editor of the Spectator, found Hogan’s explanation rather feeble. He was not, after all, “the first nurse to take classes and work at the same time.” Smith thought that Hogan should “have been more prepared to accept the pressure of being a ‘first.’ Extraordinary events call for extraordinary preparation.” Although Hogan returned to school for the spring  semester, he subsequently left the state and finished his degree elsewhere. When later asked about his role in the suit, Hogan insisted . “Alumnae Respond to Criticism of ‘W’ policies,” Spectator, January , . . Grace Aaron, “Students React to First Male Classmate,” Spectator, September , . . Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, –; Kim Keetch, “W Goes Coeducational,” Spectator, September , .

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“it was worth the problems. Even though I did not get an opportunity to graduate, it was worth being the first one to open the doors to the other men in the state of Mississippi.” A survey by the Spectator revealed mixed reactions to the ruling. One woman described male students as “an intrusion into our life.” Another noted sarcastically, “I think it’s great. Maybe we can get a football team started in a few years and get down to some serious education.” Others were more philosophical. “They take up parking spaces,” one woman quipped, but “[o]ther than that I like everything about them.” A male student was ecstatic: “I am in heaven. It’s more convenient for me to attend MUW. The people are nice, especially the instructors. . . . I want my degree.” MUW’s president, Dr. James Strobel, assured students that they would experience “few changes on campus from the admission of males.” Although MUW’s masthead was later changed to read “Mississippi University for Women— and Smart Men, Too,” its promotional materials continued to highlight its single-gender history and its programs designed for women’s special needs and interests. Officials at Texas Woman’s University, the largest public college for women in the nation, believed the Hogan decision would not impact their admissions policies. The school had voluntarily opened all of its graduate programs and its undergraduate programs in the Institute of Health Sciences to men in  and , respectively. The single-gender admissions policy of the undergraduate General Division met the Title IX criteria for exemption from the Educational Act amendments of . TWU’s greatest threat appeared to be legislative penny-pinchers who proposed merging TWU with its neighbor, the coeducational University of North Texas. TWU lobbyists managed to persuade the legislators that its mission of empowering women was sufficiently distinct to make a merger unfeasible.

. Summer Smith, “Being ‘First’ Takes Its Toll,” Spectator, November , ; Joe Rogers, “Joe Hogan: The Man Who Broke the Gender Barrier,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March , . . “What about Men at the W?” Spectator, September , ; Keetch, “W Goes Coeducational”; “Mississippi University for Women,” November , , http://www. muw.edu/history.htm; Patricia Donat, associate professor at MUW, “Preliminary Enrollment Statistics for Fall  Report That We Have  Male and  Female Students Enrolled,” e-mail to author, November , . . Faith Gray, “Huey Says TWU Unaffected by Supreme Court Ruling,” Denton Record-Chronicle, July , ; “Discrimination or Compensation? Student’s Battle Raises Questions over the Right of Texas Woman’s U. to Ban Men from Some Majors,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October , ).

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TWU’s equanimity was disrupted when Steven Serling, a male accepted into the nursing program at TWU for the fall of , complained to legislators that he should be able to enroll in any of the school’s undergraduate programs, including those in the General Division. Serling insisted that he did not know about the exclusionary policies when he applied to TWU, but he made it clear that he thought such practices were discriminatory. In response to assertions that TWU had traditionally been a single-sex college for women since its founding in , Serling replied, “It was traditional for blacks to be slaves. It was traditional for blacks to get on the back of the bus. Just because something is traditional doesn’t make it right. . . . This is the s, not the s.” The Board of Regents, cognizant of ongoing legal challenges to the single-gender admissions policies of the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute, voted six to one to open all programs to men beginning in the summer of . Students, faculty, and alumnae reacted with surprise and anger to the regents’ ruling. Opponents of coeducation organized a number of campus protests, including a “girl-cott” of the bookstore, the occupation of the admissions office, and the establishment of a “tent city.” They founded the TWU Preservation Society (motto: “Texas Woman’s University—Let’s Keep It That Way”) and, hoping to overturn their decision, filed a lawsuit against the regents. TWU’s president tried to make the best of the situation, and urged university supporters to work together in establishing programs that would address the needs of the state’s women. Although a newcomer to TWU, Carol Surles was familiar with struggles for educational equity. TWU’s first African American president, she had been one of a handful of black students to integrate Pensacola High School in Florida in the s. Surles believed in equal-

. Lenni Lissberger, “Male Student Refuses to Attend,” Lasso (student newspaper of TWU), August , ; “Women: ‘Better Dead Than Coed,’” Roanoke Times and World News, December , ; Linda L. Meggett, “Citadel Pans TWU Plan to Admit Men,” Charleston Post and Courier, December , . . “Texas Woman’s & Man’s University: Regents Pull Sneak Play, Angry Students Protest,” Lasso, December , ; April M. Washington, “TWU Students Wage War on Regents,” Denton Record-Chronicle, December , ; Kim North, “TWU Students Stage Sit-in to Protest Co-ed Decision,” Dallas Morning News, December , ; Deon R. Daugherty, “TWU Regents Horrify Students,” Denton Record-Chronicle, January , ; Justin Bachman, “Battle of the Sexes Continues,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, January , ; Shirlanda Bennett, “Group Protests TWU Sex Change,” North Texas Daily (student newspaper of the University of North Texas), February , ; Myers et al. v. Lipe et al., Civil Action no. CV-CV, June , , Woman’s Collection, TWU.

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ity, but she also knew that its attainment often required special consideration for women and minorities. The regents’ vote raised numerous questions about the parameters of educational equality. Supporters of TWU’s single-gender status insisted that historical prejudices meant that women were not able to compete on equal terms with men in coeducational settings. As one student put it, “it is an issue of power. Men have it, women don’t. . . . White men don’t need an institution to ‘focus’ on themselves, they can do that anywhere they want. . . . Let’s not forget that the argument of separate is not equal does not make sense in a vacuum.” The associate vice president for academic affairs echoed her opinion when he explained that single-sex education was “a legitimate way to redress some of the educational inequities of the past.” Joyce Williams, chair of the department of sociology and social work at TWU, concurred. She told the Dallas Morning News, “Some institutions are, in the best sense of the term, ‘affirmative action’ programs because they are our best hope for ensuring that the work force and leaders of tomorrow are consistent with the demographics of our population.” An angry student quipped that if Serling did not like TWU’s admissions policy, he should “go to the Citadel.” Serling had no sympathy with those advocating compensatory treatment for women or minorities. “Everybody has special needs. . . . Do we make colleges for midgets? Do we make colleges for black males whose fathers were absent? . . . Women who feel they need a special environment because they lack self-esteem need to get professional help. It’s not the state’s place to nurture.” An editorial in the Houston Post conceded that “[s]ome genderspecific-segregated-things work” but admitted that “such things rarely are legal in the public arena given the way America has misused ‘separate but equal.’” The Houston Chronicle also thought that TWU’s regents had made the right decision: “The record shows that the dropping of barriers—allmale, all-female, all-white, all-black, whatever—does not bring about all the horribles which are the scenarios of protest.” Indeed, the Chronicle concluded, “the schools remain overwhelmingly what they were, predominantly . April M. Washington, “Surles Hopes for Unity,” Denton Record-Chronicle, December , ; letter from the university president, January , , in National Alumnae Association “packet,” January , the Woman’s Collection, TWU; report from the president, “Proceedings of the Texas Woman’s University Faculty Senate, April th, ,” the Woman’s Collection, TWU. . Dawn Tawwater-King, “A Place of Our Own,” Denton NOW : (October ): ; Kevin Caston, “Man Protests TWU Policy, Dallas Morning News, August , ; Joyce Williams, “Double Standard? TWU Has Reasons for All-Woman Status,” Dallas Morning News, January , ; Lissberger, “Male Student Refuses.”

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this or predominantly that. Their missions and emphasis remain the same.” This was, of course, what the regents had also concluded. The admission of men to MUW and TWU left only two publicly supported single-gender institutions in the nation: the Citadel in South Carolina and the Virginia Military Institute in Virginia. Both were the focus of lawsuits aiming to integrate their all-male corps of cadets. In a  letter, the Justice Department claimed that VMI’s admissions policy violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of . In response, the Virginia attorney general filed a lawsuit in federal district court maintaining that single-gender institutions were legal under Title IX of the Education Act amendments of . A series of appeals and countersuits between Virginia and the Justice Department soon followed. When district judge Jackson Kiser ruled in  that VMI’s admissions policy was constitutional, the court of appeals overturned his ruling. In response, VMI appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court refused to hear the appeal. This left the school with three options presented by the court of appeals: make VMI a private institution, provide a parallel experience for women, or admit women to the corps of cadets at VMI. In February , VMI presented its proposal for the Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership (VWIL) to operate at Mary Baldwin, a private women’s college located nearly thirty miles away. To many, VWIL was reminiscent of earlier efforts to maintain racial segregation by establishing allblack professional and graduate schools. “Separate-but-equal,” a New York Times editorial proclaimed, “is a doctrine long discredited for addressing racial inequality. There should be the same presumption against using it when the discrimination is against women.” The Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership was clearly not a female VMI, that is, a single-sex military school that used adversarial methods to prepare citizen soldiers. As VWIL’s director, Brenda Bryant, explains, “VWIL . Quoted in April M. Washington, “Man Makes Unlikely Catalyst for Change,” Denton Record-Chronicle, December , ; “Not So Simple: TWU Is a Symbol of What Law Emphasizes Now,” Houston Post, December , ; “Changing Times: Texas Woman’s Regents Act Right to Get Right with the Law, Houston Chronicle, December , . . “Virginia Files Lawsuit on V.M.I. Admissions,” New York Times, February , ; Linda Greenhouse, “Supreme Court Roundup,” New York Times, May , ; “A Legal Lesson for V.M.I.,” New York Times, October , ; “V.M.I.’s Unacceptable Remedy,” New York Times, October , . . “VMI’s Mary Baldwin Plan Approved by Federal Judge,” Charleston Post and Courier, May , ; “V.M.I.’s Unacceptable Remedy.”

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teaches traditional military leadership, including ROTC, but it also stresses non-hierarchal leadership that moves power away from a central leader.” Program participants enrolled in special courses in mathematics, science, physical education, and leadership, but they took the majority of their classes with Mary Baldwin students. Although they were required to spend their sophomore year in the VWIL House, they spent their other three years in the Mary Baldwin dormitories. The classroom and the parade ground emphasized building up rather than knocking down. Jeffrey Rosen, writing in the New Republic, feared that VWIL would not be found a legally acceptable alternative to coeducation. “Rather than setting out to construct a separate but equal program for women, as the lower court demanded, the state made the mistake of granting the Mary Baldwin faculty carte blanche to design whatever program it pleased. Perhaps understandably, the faculty decided to advance its own institutional interest rather than VMI’s litigation interests; and the program that resulted was an explicit rejection of everything that makes VMI unique.” To Rosen, the VMI case provided a perfect example of “the dangers of treating gender discrimination like racial discrimination.” He blamed VMI’s legal challenges on “First Wave” feminists who sought “equality” at all costs and ignored evidence that students might be better served in “separate but different schools, on the premise that women learn better in harmony and men in adversity.” Rosen de-emphasized any parallels with Brown v. Board of Education. The social stigma associated with all-black schools was not affixed to women’s colleges, and alumnae from single-gender institutions were generally not less successful than their coeducational colleagues. Rosen warned that treating gender like race would endanger affirmative action for women and eventually end the tax-exempt status of all sorts of single-gender programs that received federal funds. Given the disagreements over educational means and ends, Rosen thought it would be better to preserve diversity. “Now, more than ever,” he concluded, “tranquil, separate spaces for men and women to reflect about their differences and similarities seem especially useful to build and preserve. That’s all the more reason to hope that the Court will hesitate to dismantle such fragile traditions as VMI and the Citadel, and will challenge the states to try to construct genuinely equal alternatives for women.” . Bill Baskervill, “Women’s Leadership Program Thriving at Mary Baldwin, Officials Say,” September , , http://www.mbc.edu/news/pressroom/clips/thriving.html; “Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership,” http://www.mbc.edu/academic/vwil/. . Rosen, “Separate but Equal at VMI: Like Race, Like Gender?” New Republic (February , ), available on-line at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/Ftrials/ conlaw/rosenarticle.html.

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The Justice Department suit against VMI also brought the question of the Citadel’s admissions policies to the public’s attention. The participation of women in the Gulf War in  led South Carolina representative Sarah Manly to introduce a bill into the general assembly that would withhold state funds from any public institution that discriminated against individuals because of their sex. Wearing a button that said “Women Are in the Gulf War; Why Aren’t They in the Citadel?” Manly led the fight for what was dubbed the Citadel Bill. The measure was quickly tabled in committee. In June , Navy veterans Patricia Johnson and Elizabeth Lacey sued for the right to attend day classes at the Citadel. Neither woman wanted to live in the barracks or drill with the cadets; both simply wanted to have the same options for classes as the male veterans. To avoid a lawsuit, the Citadel eliminated its day program for veterans. The battle to prevent women from enrolling in day classes soon intensified. In December , a South Carolina high school senior, Shannon Faulkner, became involved in a class debate over a Sports Illustrated article on hazing at the Citadel. After discussion moved to the school’s single-gender admissions policy, Faulkner went to the guidance office and requested an application. She asked the counselor to delete references to gender on her transcripts and sent off her application. Shortly thereafter, she was offered a place in the corps. The Citadel discovered its mistake and rescinded Faulkner’s acceptance. In March , Faulkner sued. She argued that the admissions policy denied her equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, and asked to be admitted to the corps of cadets. In June, the U.S. government joined her suit and expanded the case to demand the admission of all qualified women. In August, district judge C. Weston Houck ruled that Faulkner should be allowed to attend day classes while the court reviewed her request. When the Citadel gained a stay by the court to keep her off the campus, Faulkner appealed. A panel of the United States Court of Appeals voted two to one to allow her to attend the Citadel as a day student until the court ruled whether she could join the corps. Judge Kenneth Hall queried “whether, under the Equal Protection Clause, a state can ever have a sufficiently important interest to justify expending public funds to maintain an institution that not only practices inequality, but celebrates it.” . Ronald Smothers, “In a Coed Age, the Citadel Stands Fast,” New York Times, March , . . Herb Frazier, “Women Sue to Attend the Citadel,” Charleston Post and Courier, June , ; Susan Faludi, “The Naked Citadel,” New Yorker (September , ): , , ; “After Suit, Citadel Extends a Barrier, to Males,” New York Times, September , .

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Faulkner’s lawsuit was set for May , , and Judge Houck told the Citadel that it should propose an acceptable remedy that he could consider during the trial. The Citadel’s lawyers saw no need for a remedial plan. They felt their claims were bolstered by Concurrent Resolution , passed by the South Carolina General Assembly on May , , that set forth “a policy of diversity in education which include[d] single-sex institutions where there [was] sufficient demand to support the same.” The lawyers for both Faulkner and the Citadel referred to the court of appeals’s rulings in the VMI case, in particular its conclusion that “the Commonwealth of Virginia, despite its announced policy of diversity, has failed to articulate an important policy that substantially supports offering the unique benefits of a VMItype education to men and not to women.” Faulkner’s lawyers interpreted this ruling to mean that Faulkner’s constitutional rights would be infringed if she were not admitted to the corps. The Citadel’s lawyers argued that the cases were not parallel because South Carolina, unlike Virginia, had a concurrent resolution justifying the exclusion of women. At the end of the May  trial, Judge Houck gave the Citadel two weeks to prepare a contingency plan in case he found its admissions policies unconstitutional. Because Faulkner was already in her second year of college, Houck decided to separate her case from that of subsequent female applicants and ordered the Citadel to admit Faulkner to the corps and gave it until the academic year – to adopt a remedial plan. The committee established by the concurrent resolution had posited several alternatives to coeducation, including “a new public institution for women in South Carolina, a ‘women’s college’ within a larger university, a compact arrangement with Mary Baldwin College in Virginia or with Converse College or Columbia College in South Carolina, and an increase in the tuition grants program to provide more money for women to attend single-gender private institutions.” Judge Houck noted that in the case of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the Supreme Court rejected Missouri’s claim that it did not have to . Shannon Richey Faulkner et al. v. James E. Jones Jr. et al., Civil Action no. : – –, U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina Charleston Division, July , , –; “U.S. Court Orders the Citadel to Allow Woman in Classes,” New York Times, August , ; “Citadel to Appeal Ruling Enrolling Woman,” New York Times, August , ; Andrew Bergstrom, “Public Forum Sheds Light on Faulkner vs. Citadel Case,” Cougar Pause (student newspaper of the College of Charleston), October , ; “Military College Is Ordered to Admit Women,” New York Times, November , . . “Citadel Hunts Options in Faulkner Case,” Charleston Post and Courier, March , ; “Faulkner, Citadel Go to Court,” Charleston Post and Courier, May , ; Faulkner v. Jones, –, –.

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provide equal law facilities for blacks because there was insufficient demand for them. He believed that this decision also made a compact arrangement with Mary Baldwin unconstitutional. Just as Missouri in  had to provide “within its borders” the same legal facilities for blacks that it provided whites, so South Carolina in  would have to provide within its borders the same military opportunities for women as it did for men. Separate, in other words, would have to be equal. The Citadel asked the court of appeals “to throw out Houck’s order or, failing that, reverse the part allowing Miss Faulkner to become a cadet.” The school proposed a women’s leadership program similar to the one put forward by VMI as an alternative to admitting women to the corps. The Institute for Leadership at Converse, like the VWIL at Mary Baldwin, was not a female military program. Instead, the program “combine[d] the liberal arts education of Converse with -hour Leadership Excellence Academic Development (LEAD) curriculum.” As at VWIL, the methods employed to teach leadership were not adversarial or competitive: “By providing mentors and a supportive learning environment, leadership teams allow participants to implement the skills learned in the academic setting in community projects.” The Citadel contended the program would give women the same benefits that men received in the corps. Faulkner’s lawyers disagreed. Women in the leadership program would not have the living experiences of cadets and would not have the prestige of a Citadel degree. Faulkner’s court-ordered admission to the corps of cadets on August , , ended six days later with her voluntary withdrawal from the school. Like Joe Hogan at MUW a decade before, she was criticized for not being prepared to be the “first.” That same fall, young women enrolled in the parallel programs established by VMI at Mary Baldwin and by the Citadel at Converse, and a new plaintiff, Nancy Mellette, announced her intention to seek admission to the corps of cadets at the Citadel. Although Mellette eventually accepted an appointment to West Point, she kept her name on the lawsuit. The debates about the admission of women to VMI and the Citadel resembled earlier arguments about the admission of men to MUW and TWU . Claudia Smith Brinson, “Wait Year If Faulkner Admitted, Citadel Asks,” Columbia State, June , ; Faulkner v. Jones, , , –, –. . “Citadel Files Appeal in Faulkner Case,” Charleston Post and Courier, September , ; “Plan to Remain a Male School,” New York Times, October , ; “Institute for Leadership,” Converse College, http://www.converse.edu/leader.htm; Linda L. Meggett, “Citadel Training Plan Questioned,” Charleston Post and Courier, October , . . Linda L. Meggett, “Girl with Citadel Ties Wants in Corps,” Charleston Post and Courier, September , .

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and still earlier ones over the admission of blacks to historically white institutions. Could separate ever be equal? Did biological differences justify distinctive institutions for men and women? Supporters of the all-male corps quoted studies that showed that “some males thrive best in an educational setting entirely suffused with a confrontational and disciplinary focus” and contended that experiences at the national service academies had shown that such programs could not survive the admission of women. Supporters of coeducation insisted that they were not against single-gender education but against segregation funded by taxpayer money. Others argued that the benefits of single-gender education for men were not as clear as they were for women. Criticism of their institutions increased the defensiveness of VMI and Citadel officials. The more outsiders denigrated their attitudes and practices as anachronistic, the more insiders rallied round the traditions that distinguished them from a modern world gone amuck. They stood for a time when every man and woman had their place and function—and these were complementary, not identical. Neither VMI nor the Citadel thought that the admission of women to the military academies was a good thing; it had altered training methods and physical standards to the detriment of the armed forces. Only VMI and the Citadel preserved the “adversative system” necessary to make men out of boys. The threat to male identities and male roles posed by the admission of women to the corps was a pervasive theme for the supporters of both institutions. “Cadets say that coeducation will destroy tradition, force longtime habits to change, dilute the alumni network, diminish the stature of the Citadel [and VMI] man, lower standards, remove privacy and the special bonding experience Citadel [and VMI] men enjoy, and change the ethical, intellectual makeup of the Citadel [and VMI] man.” Bumper stickers pleaded “Save the Males,” and T-shirts proclaimed “Better Dead Than Coed.” In an open letter to VMI alumni, Phyllis Schlafly recommended that the school privatize rather than succumb to “the radical feminists and their cohorts in . Caplice, “Single-Sex Education,” , , ; Beth Willinger, “Single-Gender Education and the Constitution,” Loyola Law Review (New Orleans)  (summer ): ; Sara L. Mandelbaum cited in Willinger, “Single-Gender Education,” . . Laura Fairchild Brodie found that “one of the prevailing characteristics among VMI alumni” was their “pervasive opposition to change.” VMI’s superintendent, Major General Josiah Bunting III, liked to quote W. C. Fields: “The only person who wants a change is a wet baby.” See Brodie, Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women (New York: Pantheon Books, ), .

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the Federal Government.” If VMI allowed “Ginsburg et al. to do . . . what Pat Schroeder et al. have done to the United States Navy, you are not the exemplars of manhood we thought you were.” On a lighter note, a Citadel supporter penned a ditty titled “Real Men Don’t Wear Heels” that emphasized the innate differences between the sexes. Referring to Shannon Faulkner’s attempt to become a member of the corps of cadets, the writer quipped: She can call her lawyer friends and fuss when she can She can wear pants and ties but she still ain’t a man I got me a good education, learned some about the world I’m proud I was a cadet and my momma was a girl So shave her head and call her mister Who in their right mind would want a brother for a sister?

Some defenders of an all-male corps viewed the admission of women as an affront to southern history. To Thomas Moncure, a member of VMI’s Board of Visitors, the attack on southern fortresses of tradition such as VMI and the Citadel was just another Yankee attempt to extirpate southern civilization. “It is no accident,” he wrote, “that the ire of the politically correct has been directed at the VMI and The Citadel. These are southern institutions, in the twin pillars of southern civilization, Virginia and South Carolina. We are entirely too used to the smug and sanctimonious Yankee, whose preferences are always superior to ours, sitting in judgment of the South.” Moncure had no doubt that the politically correct would gloat over a Supreme Court ruling mandating the admission of women to VMI and would celebrate the end of centuries of tradition. But he would be very surprised to find “voices of glee . . . with Southern accents.” Moncure resigned from the board when it voted not to privatize. One wonders what he would have thought about Terri Reddings, later hired by VMI to handle the admission of women. Reddings, a graduate of Hollins, a women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia, did not share Moncure’s reverence for the Confederate past. “The great attention to Southern history,” she mused, “is interesting to me as a black woman from a black family. My great-greatgrandfather was one of the last persons to be sold as a slave in the state, so I . Sybil Fix, “Citadel’s Change to Coed Unlikely to Be Traumatic,” Charleston Post and Courier, June , ; quoted in Brodie, Breaking Out, ; quoted in Catherine S. Manegold, In Glory’s Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, the Citadel, and a Changing America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), . . Quoted in Brodie, Breaking Out, .

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guess I think that Southern history was not the most pleasant experience for lots of people.” Reddings believed that VMI “could benefit from a little diversity: ‘the world is not full of twenty-two-year-old white gentlemen.’” Critics of VMI and the Citadel found many school traditions analogous to plantation practices. In her book on Shannon Faulkner, Catherine Manegold compares the compliance required of new knobs to that of slaves, the dominance of upperclassmen to that of masters, and the appearance of the campus to that of the Charleston workhouse. Just as poor whites could always count on slaves to provide a “mudsill” class, so too “rats could always find some solace in taking digs at those yet lower on the social scale. Blacks and women fit that role.” Similarly, Citadel faculty and students interviewed by Susan Faludi for her book Stiffed commented on the use of derogatory words for women and for female body parts as ways of disciplining cadets. “They called you a ‘pussy’ all the time” or “a fucking little girl,” one cadet recalled; another noted that he was told he looked like a menstruating woman. “[I]f you are not doing what you are supposed to do, you are not a man, you are a woman, and that is the way you are disciplined in the barracks every day, every hour.” Women who challenged gender patterns as idealized by southern patriarchs were denied the protection of the pedestal. A professor of political science at the Citadel received obscene phone calls, discovered sexually explicit graffiti on her office door, and found death threats on her student-evaluation forms. When she complained to her department chair, she was told to “be more maternal toward the students.” Shannon Faulkner’s challenge provoked similar misogynous outbursts. “Let her in—then fuck her to death” was written on a lavatory wall at the school, and her family’s house was spray painted with “bitch, dyke, whore, and lesbo.” In the spring of , the Supreme Court agreed to rule on the constitutionality of VMI’s admissions policy. Although the Citadel was not a party to the suit, lawyers acknowledged that the ruling would affect its singlegender status as well. In a seven-to-one decision, handed down on June , , the Supreme Court ruled “the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee precludes Virginia from reserving exclusively to men the unique educa. Ibid., –. . Manegold, In Glory’s Shadow. . Quoted in Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Perennial, ), , , , . . Ibid., –.

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tional opportunities VMI affords.” Significantly, the Court concluded that neither VMI’s “goal of producing citizen-soldiers” nor its “adversative method of training” was “inherently unsuitable to women.” It also disagreed with the Fourth Circuit’s ruling that a parallel program for women at Mary Baldwin was equal to that provided for men at VMI. The Court compared the VWIL program to ones established fifty years earlier to keep blacks out of the flagship universities of the region. Feminists hailed United States v. Virginia et al. as “a landmark victory for the women’s legal movement.” Courts had historically applied strict scrutiny to cases of racial discrimination while using the less rigorous intermediatelevel scrutiny test with gender. To pass the midlevel test, a state that wanted to support a single-gender school had to “prove the existence of important governmental interests that [were] advanced by the exclusionary admissions policy” and demonstrate that this policy was “based on real differences between the sexes rather then [sic] stereotypic notions about the proper roles of men and women.” Both Justice Scalia in his dissenting opinion and Justice Rehnquist in his concurring opinion viewed the majority of the Court as applying the strict-scrutiny standard when they demanded an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for classifications based on gender. What did this raising of the “standard” for gender mean for private women’s institutions and for affirmative action programs aimed at women? Significantly, the Court distinguished between single-gender education for men and that for women: “[S]ingle-gender programming that is tailored to overcome sex-based obstacles stands on a different footing from all-male programming that does not serve such a compensatory purpose.” Once more, the Court drew parallels between gender and race: “The pluralistic argument for preserving all-male colleges is uncomfortably similar to the pluralistic argument for preserving all-white colleges.” Like MUW and TWU before them, VMI and the Citadel tried to maintain the essence of their single-gender past. The newcomers were to adjust to the dominant culture; indeed, VMI called its program for the integration of women an “assimilation” plan. Unfortunately, the term assimilation brought to mind the film Star Trek: First Contact where aliens attempting to create a homogeneous collective chanted: “We are Borg. You will be assimilated. . United States, Petitioner v. Virginia et al. and Virginia et al., Petitioners v. United States,  Sup. Ct.  (), , , . . Deborah L. Brake, “Reflections on the VMI Decision,” American University Journal of Gender and the Law : (fall ): ; Caplice, “Single-Sex Education,” ; Brake, “Reflections on the VMI Decision,” , .

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Resistance is futile.” It was apparently not uncommon for VMI administrators attending assimilation sessions to quip, “I have been assimilated. Have you been assimilated? Resistance is futile.” VMI officials pledged to maintain the traditions of the corps. Women would receive the same close-cropped haircuts and the same uniform items and would be required to pass the same VMI fitness test as male cadets. VMI’s superintendent declared his “fixed intention to preserve and sustain those principles and features of a VMI education that have proved their worth for a century and a half. One of them is that all cadets be treated the same, and their achievements be measured by common standards. The egalitarian ethos of VMI does not know gender.” As one VMI official put it, “When it comes to rats, they should almost be eunuchs. Gender, race, religion, whatever—it’s irrelevant in the ratline. A rat is almost like being a separate gender. You are a class and culture by yourself.” It soon became clear that adjustments would have to be made in corps culture. Even the most conservative officials realized that some of the crude sexual expressions used to “break in” rats were degrading to women and would open the school to charges of sexual harassment. The term dyke used to describe the relationship between first classmen and the rats who helped them get dressed or “dyked out” had different connotations when applied to pairs of women. Similarly, for a cadet officer or faculty member to inform a woman cadet that he intended to “bone” her for misbehavior might also raise some eyebrows. So too would the phrase “raping your virgin ducks” for pulling apart the legs of newly starched trousers. In the eleven months between its decision to admit women and the arrival of the first female rats, VMI formulated a detailed assimilation plan that addressed such issues as fraternization, jewelry and cosmetics, visitation, cadet privacy, billeting, cadet terminology, physical education, recruiting, and orientation. Women exchange students from Texas A&M and Norwich . Mike Allen, “Defiant V.M.I. to Admit Women, but Will Not Ease Rules for Them,” New York Times, September , ; First Quarterly Report, United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Roanoke Division, United States of America, Plaintiff v. Commonwealth of Virginia et al., Defendants, Civil Action no. --R, December ; “VMI Files First Report on Assimilation of Women,” http://www.vmi.edu/ PR/release.htm; assimilation quote from Brodie, Breaking Out, . . Allen, “Defiant V.M.I.”; First Quarterly Report, United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Roanoke Division, United States of America, Plaintiff v. Commonwealth of Virginia, et al.; “VMI Files First Report”; quoted in Brodie, Breaking Out, . . Brodie, Breaking Out, , .

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University in Vermont would serve as role models for the new women cadets, and a woman gynecologist would provide health care services. A woman admissions officer developed coeducational marketing and recruitment strategies. The controversial departure of two women cadets in the fall of  forced the Citadel to rethink its assimilation policies. When Kim Messer of Clover, South Carolina, and Jeanie Mentavlos of Charlotte, North Carolina, withdrew after only one semester, they alleged that they had been physically and mentally harassed. Cadets had pushed Messer’s face against a wall with a rifle, forced her to drink tea until she vomited, rubbed up against Mentavlos while she stood in formation, barged into her room wearing only boxer shorts, refused to allow her to obtain physical therapy for pelvic stress fractures, and set both women’s uniforms on fire with nail polish remover. Administrators at the Citadel initially denied the allegations and claimed that the women had fabricated the charges to justify their own poor academic performance. Although they later acknowledged that the incidents had occurred and eventually disciplined fourteen cadets as a consequence, officials claimed that the hazing was not “gender based” but rather related to endemic problems in the Fourth Class System. The commandant of cadets told an ad hoc committee reviewing the coeducation plan that “he was convinced that the women were so well accepted that male cadets treated them like any other first-year students. He noted that two male cadets also had their shirts set afire after being doused with nail polish remover.” The media were skeptical of claims that the mistreatment of Messer and Mentavlos had nothing to do with gender. “Coming after the Citadel’s yearslong struggle to keep women out,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “the accusations of abuse by the two cadets have once again focused a national spotlight on this pocket of fierce resistance, long backed by the state, to the national norm of coeducation.” This latest incident appeared part of a pattern of institutionalized intimidation designed to scare women away from the campus: “The Citadel’s hazing tradition teaches young men that brutalizing others and denigrating women is what it takes to be a military officer. . . . . “Assimilation Plan,” Status Report no. , June , , http://www.vmi.edu/PR/ PLAN.HTM; “VMI Coeducation Recruitment Initiatives: VMI Hires Female Admissions Officer,” http://www.vmi.edu/PR/coed.htm. . Sybil Fix, “Women at the Citadel: What Went Wrong?” Charleston Post and Courier, March , ; Peter Applebome, “Citadel’s President Insists Coeducation Will Succeed,” New York Times, January , ; Richard Green Jr., “Mentavlos Adds Citadel to Suit: State May Pay Bills,” Charleston Post and Courier, August , . . “ Women Accepted at Citadel for Fall,” New York Times, January , .

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Unless they take steps to change an institutional culture so at odds with American society, Citadel graduates will find they are unprepared for the real world after playing sadistic games for four years.” Faced with a public relations crisis, officials canceled classes and held a daylong session of sensitivity training. The Citadel hired Brigadier General Emory Mace, a Citadel graduate and father of Nancy Mace, one of the two remaining female cadets, as the new commandant of cadets, and school officials pledged to reform abuses in the Fourth Class System. Consequently, when the second class of women entered the Citadel in August , they found not only two upper-class women cadets on campus, but also two adults in each barracks to oversee cadets at night, a new female assistant commandant, and revised regulations for the treatment of knobs. Suzanne Ozment, professor of English and dean of undergraduate studies, was given the additional title of dean of women. VMI and the Citadel, like MUW and TWU, confronted considerable disagreement about the nature of gender differences and their consequences for education. Why, many asked, would anyone want to attend a school aimed at the opposite sex? In the case of Joe Hogan at MUW and Steven Serling at TWU, the attraction seemed to be an appropriate curriculum in a convenient location. This was true for some women applicants to VMI and the Citadel as well. Others liked the strict honor codes and standards, the small size, and the historical mission. A number of women enrolled at VMI or the Citadel because they had been offered full academic or athletic scholarships. Kimberly Herbert, one of the first women to enroll at VMI, told a reporter from the Washington Post, “Any time any guy asks me, I say, ‘I’m here for probably the same reason you are.’ . . . I’m interested in the military, and I want an education. Okay?” Most of the women who entered the class of  hoped that the school would remain the same. “We don’t want to change VMI,” one explained. “If it was going to change, we wouldn’t want to come.” Even VMI’s superintendent, Major General Josiah Bunting, who had fought hard to keep the school all male, confessed that he was pleased with . Adam Nissiter, “Woman Who Left the Citadel Tells of Brutal Hazing Ordeal,” New York Times, February , ; “The Citadel’s Culture of Abuse,” New York Times, January , . . “Citadel Offers Detailed Plan for Women,” New York Times, May , ; Sybil Fix, “School Sets New Tone for Corp of Cadets,” Charleston Post and Courier, August , . . Peter Finn, “Summer School Gives N. Va. Women a Head Start on Infamous ‘Rat Line,’” Washington Post, August , ; Brodie, Breaking Out, . . Finn, “Summer School.”

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the assimilation process: “The women who were attracted to VMI are very much like the young men who have come since the beginning—practical, conservative, military-minded, engaged by the school’s tradition, mindful of its challenges but not afraid of them either.” Despite the predictions of doomsayers, the “spirit of VMI” seemed to have survived coeducation. The Citadel’s dean of women, Suzanne Ozment, also found few differences between the academic abilities, political leanings, and career objectives of male and female cadets. The women tended to be a more diverse group— ethnically, racially, and regionally—but otherwise, they chose similar majors and articulated similar concerns for home, hearth, and country. Like most Citadel males, Citadel females seemed to be drawn to the school because it embodied the conservative values of a conservative region. Interviews with cadets at the Citadel reveal a variety of gender attitudes on the part of faculty, staff, and students at the school. If women cadets agreed on anything, it was their dislike of regulations, organizations, and activities that distinguished them from the rest of the corps. One junior remembered being taken away from group activities several times during freshmen orientation for special female sessions on sexual harassment, meetings with the ombudsperson, and discussions on gynecological problems. “[I]t met with a lot of negative attitudes from the men,” she recalled. Finally, the women rebelled. “They tried to drag us to [a female meeting] last year,” she smiled, “and as sophomores we got together and said we’re not going to go, let them pull all of us, but we’re not going. And nothing happened.” A Croatian native who entered the Citadel in  was astonished by the prejudice she encountered. “[N]ever in my life,” she confided, “have I regretted that I’m female, until I got here.” Despite her achievements as a cadet, she found it difficult to make rank. In fact, a number of males took her aside and demanded that she tell the company commander that she did not want rank so “they’ll put one of our guys on.” Nominated for an academic award by the dean of undergraduate studies, she was told “yeah, you got it because you’re a girl.” She found it frustrating that “[n]o matter how hard you try, how good you are, for them you’re never good enough because you’re a girl. That’s the part that hurts.” Yet she confessed that she too was harder on the female than on the male knobs. “We work them hard just . Peter Finn, “Leading the March into Coeducation: A Smiling Major General,” Washington Post, August , . . Ozment, interview by author, Charleston, December , . . Crystal Dawn Spring, interview by Tess Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author.

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because we want them to be good,” she explained. “They have to be ten times better than the guys to be just equal.” A number of the cadets commented about regional gender stereotypes and the difficulty they posed for women’s assimilation into the corps. Stereotypical southern women—the Martha Stewart types, as one cadet described them—would find it hard “to survive The Citadel.” Women to do well “have to be demanding; you have to sometimes be very aggressive, to force yourself saying this is how I feel.” A sophomore from an air force family thought “it would be easier to integrate an all-male college in the North than it has been, and is, in the South.” Women of color at the Citadel seemed to downplay racial discrimination. A sophomore from Columbia, South Carolina, knew black males who had experienced racism, but as for black women, “we’re discriminated more so as a gender [than a] race.” Another cadet, a Korean native whose family had settled in Alabama, was proud to be “the first Asian woman” at the school and similarly felt that any discrimination was linked to her sex rather than to her race. Yet she had no sympathy with former cadets Mentavlos and Messer who in her opinion used cries of sexual harassment to cover their own inadequacies. She thought the two women “decided to fire the stuff up [the hazing incident in which male cadets ignited their clothing] so they would be able to leave . . . with some money in their pockets.” Male cadets at the Citadel also confirmed regional gender stereotypes. One man who grew up in a military family joked that his family “warned me about the women of Charleston.” They wanted him to be careful “of the southern belle looking for the MRS degree (presumably this means male, rich southern).” Although he felt that his military background made him more willing than most to accept women as his equals, he observed that this was not always the case with other cadets. For instance, the failure of any one woman to meet physical training or marching standards was generalized to the entire sex. “There are a couple of females who have had heat injuries, so they use that as a way to say females can’t hack it: they’re always passing . Vlasta Zekulic, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author. . Jai E. Kim, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author. Morgan Lynn, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; transcript in possession of the author. Megan Gentry, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author. . Toshika J. Hudson, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of author. Kim, interview.

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out. [They] forget before females got here, they still had just as many passing out, but they were males. But because it’s women, they’re stereotyping.” The combination of southern and military stereotypes made for a potent combination. “This is definitely a testosterone breeding ground,” one cadet noted. The type of man who chose a military school often held very traditional views of gender identities, roles, and relations. The “macho” attitudes of many of the men made it difficult for them to relate to women. “They get here, and they got females, and some of them are by their definition ‘more manly than them.’ Not only are they intimidated by the fact that females can be stronger and tougher than them, but the fact that they can still be female.” For many men, this was frightening. “They’re not mature enough to handle the fact that they’re not going to be the knight in shining armor, that sometimes they might be the ones getting rescued, and she might, the typical female here, be the one saving them. And it scares them.” The southern tradition of treating women as ladies could conflict with the military goal of treating women as soldiers. Several of the male cadets observed that female cadets often had a difficult time with gender stereotypes as well. Some of the women “try so hard to fit in that they want to be like one of the guys.” One psychology major observed that “female cadets here are viewed as men, for lack of a better word. Even Freud,” he mused, “said that women are just failed men. A lot of my classmates . . . tend to view them as more of a macho attitude, tomboyish type, rather than the traditional, go to another college, get married, have kids, stay at home and all that good stuff.” Another cadet put it more bluntly. After noting that “there are not many girls here from the South,” he explained that in his home state of South Carolina, “girls” were brought up expecting their brother to go to the Citadel while they were to “marry a Citadel guy.” In fact, he was incredulous that a well-bred woman would want to go to a military school. “I have sisters who are in no way military (and the girls are better when they’ve been raised in the South) and have no desire to go to a school like this.” He had trouble viewing women cadets as authority figures: “I saw female upperclassmen as girls, the opposite sex, before I saw them as someone to be feared like I saw males.” . Michael McPherson, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author. . Ibid. . Ibid.; Taylor Morris, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author.

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The emphasis on corps unity makes it difficult to ascertain the predominance of these gender stereotypes. Was the misogyny manifested in the barracks or on the parade grounds ingrained, or was it effected to please upperclassmen? Cadets often received conflicting signals about how to treat women in the corps. When one company refused to salute the regimental executive officer because she was a woman, a knob reported the incident to the human affairs office as required by the Book of Regulations. Although such reports were supposedly guaranteed confidentiality, he received “flak” for “pulling” his classmates. He confessed that he probably would not report an incident of sexual harassment again. Male cadets seemed more willing to acknowledge racial prejudices in the corps. One knob, who labeled himself “part black,” felt that most of the problems faced by the corps were “either gender motivated or racially motivated.” But he felt that the esprit de corps was so strong that it could eventually overcome racial and gender stereotypes. “As soon as you can prove yourself,” he insisted, “it [discrimination] pretty much goes away.” Would VMI and the Citadel be able to establish a “gender-blind” corps? Some commentators thought so. Looking back on the first coeducational “rat line,” a VMI senior concluded, “After a while, you’re not thinking ‘female rat,’ you’re just thinking ‘rat.’” Not all agreed, of course. Thomas Moncure, a VMI alumnus who opposed coeducation, insisted the “absolute and stark egalitarianism of the place is gone, because when you put men and women together, you are looking at your classmates for procreative purposes.” Moncure conceded that the first group of women had done remarkably well but insisted, “[W]e’ll only attract groundbreakers like that for the first year. After that, why would you go there, male or female? VMI will slip into oblivion.” The first women cadets achieved impressive academic and military records. Nancy Mace, whose transfer credits enabled her to finish her degree in three years, graduated from the Citadel in  with honors. Her classmate Petra Lovetinska, who graduated in , was commissioned as an officer in the marines in the summer following her graduation. At the ceremony, she re-

. Ben Hodgins, interview by Thomas, Charleston, December , ; tape and transcript in possession of the author. . McPherson, interview. . Morris, interview. . Peter Finn, “VMI Women Reach End of Rat Line,” Washington Post, March , ; quoted in Finn, “Leading the March.”

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ceived an award “for the highest overall average for a female student in the Officer Candidate School.” Chih-Yuan Ho and Melissa K. Graham, the first women to graduate from VMI, also earned honors. Both sought military careers, Ho in the navy and Graham in the army, and both sought graduate degrees, Ho in dentistry and Graham in family counseling. In its coverage of their accomplishments, VMI emphasized the women’s desire to be treated the same as other cadets. Ho said that she hoped “to be remembered as a VMI graduate period not as a woman who graduated from VMI,” while Graham asserted, “Yes, I am a woman, but first and foremost, I am a member of the Corps and proud to be so.” As these examples suggest, United States v. Virginia et al. did not end the debates over “separate but equal.” If anything, the case revealed a wide spectrum of philosophical and pedagogical justifications for diverse educational practices and institutions. In many ways, the debates over coeducation at MUW, TWU, the Citadel, and VMI constituted part of a larger discussion on the merits of single-gender schools. But more specifically, the singlegender admissions policies of these four institutions raised concerns about the constitutionality of single-sex educational programs in the public realm. Did the need to provide equal educational opportunities for the sexes rule out the possibility of single-sex math and science classes in middle and high schools as well as in colleges? Would special public programs designed to target at-risk youth in the inner cities (that is, black males) also be found unconstitutional? And if single-gender schooling, like single-race schooling, violated the equal-protection clause, could single-gender programs in the private sphere be justified? In an article called “Single-Sex Public Education” in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Tara Boland asserts that United States v. Virginia “established a new standard for determining the constitutionality” of single-gender education in the public sphere. The Court allowed for “diversity” in education by conceding that single-gender education had merits and that this choice should remain an option in the public realm. In order for such single-gender programs to be legal, they must “ensure equal and non-prejudicial treatment of the sexes.” According to Boland, it would be difficult to meet these criteria. How, she asks, can we be sure that programs designed to remedy disadvantages due to gender stereotypes do . “Lovetinska Given Officer’s Commission, Charleston Post and Courier, August , ; “First Women to Graduate from VMI,” http://www.vmi.edu/pr/ir/may/ women.html.

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not, by accepting these stereotypes as real, end up perpetuating them? In other words, could separate ever be equal? Many who favored the admission of women to the Citadel and VMI also favored the continued existence of women’s colleges and girls’ school. As Judith R. Shapiro, the president of Barnard College, explains in an article, “What Women Can Teach Men,” all-male and all-female colleges fostered very different cultures: “In a society that favors men over women, men’s institutions operate to preserve privilege; women’s institutions challenge privilege and attempt to expand access to the good things of life.” To Shapiro, the issue was one of nurture, not nature: “Women’s colleges . . . exist to address inequality between the sexes and to serve the interests of women—not as places where women can think differently, or learn differently, or speak differently, but as the proverbial room of one’s own.” Many educational observers believe that remedying past discrimination, whether toward racial groups or toward women, requires more than equal treatment. In an article in the Yale Law Journal, Stephen Carter argues that to compare Regents of the University of California v. Bakke () to Brown “is to pretend that history never happened and that the present doesn’t exist.” Indeed, Carter insists, “[T]o say that two centuries of struggle for the most basic of civil rights have been mostly about freedom from racial categorization rather than freedom from racial oppression, is to trivialize the lives and deaths of those who have suffered under racism.” Similarly, in an article on VMI in the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Amy H. Nemko contends that an “analysis of the historical background and social context of sex discrimination suggests that the goal of sex equality is not simply the elimination of sex classifications per se, but the elimination of those sex classifications that contravene equality.” Considerable disagreement remains about the best way to remedy the educational inequities of the past. For institutions such as MUW and TWU, the solution lies in programs that emphasize “academic and leadership preparation for women,” provide “an awareness of gender-related issues and multicultural diversity,” instill “a sense of responsibility for service to the community,” create “a campus environment which empowers women,” enable

. Boland, “Single-Sex Public Education: Equality versus Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law :, available on-line at http://www.kaw.yoebb. edu/conlaw/issues/vol/num/boland.htm. . Shapiro, “What Women Can Teach Men,” New York Times, November , . . Carter quoted in Amy H. Nemko, “Single-Sex Public Education after VMI: The Case for Women’s Schools, Harvard Women’s Law Journal : (spring ): ; see also .

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“women . . . to excel and to assume leadership roles in both traditional and nontraditional endeavors,” and serve “as a source of knowledge and as a depository of information about women and their contribution to the history and advancement of the State . . . , the nation, and the world.” These educational goals and outcomes, taken from the mission statements of MUW and TWU, reinforce the assertion of researchers such as M. Elizabeth Tidball and of groups such as the Women’s College Coalition (WCC) that singlegender education is advantageous for women. Elizabeth Tidball’s research focuses on the accomplishments of alumnae from women’s colleges. Although some critics question the validity of her findings and contend that the socioeconomic background of students rather than the single-sex educational environment might account for these women’s successes, Tidball counters that “the productivity of women’s colleges is disproportionately greater than their selectivity.” In a volume titled Taking Women Seriously, Tidball lists several “institutional characteristics” that empower women students. What are these characteristics? They include a “critical mass of women,” “places and spaces for women’s voices,” leadership opportunities, “celebration of traditions,” “belief in women’s capacities,” “high expectations,” and an “active and empowering alumnae association.” Lisa Wolf-Wendel’s comparison of Bryn Mawr, a seven sisters’ school in Pennsylvania, and Bennett, a black women’s college in North Carolina, supports Tidball’s contention that successful outcomes are not necessarily correlates of a wealthy clientele or a large endowment. Indeed, Wolf-Wendel “found that regardless of whether an institution was a women’s college or not, if women believed that their institution cared about student learning, diversity and gender equality, and civil involvement and social issues, women . . . tended to have positive outcomes.” The Women’s College Coalition, headquartered in Washington, D.C., also publicizes the benefits of single-gender education for women. The WCC represents seventy-three women’s colleges in the United States and Canada and “sponsors research in areas relating to the education of women and . Mission and Purpose, Mississippi University for Women, http://www.muw.edu/ mission.htm; University Mission, Texas Woman’s University, http://www.twu.edu/ o-pres/strategicplan/-/. . Irene Harwarth, “A Closer Look at Women’s Colleges,” http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ WomensColleges/intro.html; M. Elizabeth Tidball, Daryl G. Smith, Charles S. Tidball, and Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Taking Women Seriously: Lessons and Legacies for Educating the Majority (Phoenix: American Council on Education and the Oryx Press, ), ; Wolf-Wendel, “A Look Inside,” in Taking Women Seriously, ed. Tidball, Smith, Tidball, and Wolf-Wendel, –; Harwarth, “Closer Look.”

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gender equity in education.” According to the WCC, alumnae of women’s colleges “[p]articipate more fully in and out of class”; “[h]ave more opportunities to hold leadership positions”; “[r]eport greater satisfaction than their coed counterparts with their college experience . . . academically, developmentally, and personally”; “[s]core higher on standardized achievement tests”; “[t]end to choose traditionally male disciplines, like the sciences, as their academic majors, in greater numbers”; “[a]re more successful in careers”; and “[t]end to be more involved in philanthropic activities after college.” Private southern women’s colleges including Judson in Alabama, Salem in North Carolina, Columbia in South Carolina, and Mary Baldwin in Virginia have posted the WCC findings on their institutional Web pages. Similar arguments are used to advocate increased support for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In a proclamation proclaiming September  through September , , “National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week,” President Clinton praised HBCUs for creating “a nurturing environment for their students”; providing “inspiring role models”; conferring “the majority of bachelor’s degrees and advanced degrees awarded to black students in the physical sciences, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and education”; improving “the quality of life in surrounding communities”; and serving “as living repositories of African American history and heritage.” A report on the future of HBCUs, published in Academe, uses examples from Spelman, a women’s college in Atlanta, to illustrate the nature of this supportive environment. At Spelman, “[s]tudents have their meals in a cafeteria surrounded by oil portraits of outstanding Black women, and . . . are exposed constantly to such visitors to their campus. They graduate ‘with their heads held high,’ half of them going on to graduate or professional study.” At coeducational and historically white schools, the source of women’s empowerment is not so clear. If, as many experts argue, college culture is traditionally male and white, what is the best way to ensure that women from diverse backgrounds are offered equal access to and equal treatment in educational institutions? Historically, the introduction of coeducation meant that women had to fight for a place on a campus whose residents and culture . Women’s College Coalition, http://www.womenscolleges.org/. . Clinton, “National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week, : By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, September , ; “The Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Future in the Balance,” republished from January–February  issue of Academe, available on-line at http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/hbcu/report.html.

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were characteristically male and conservative. Male students often resented women’s presence on campus and barred them from clubs, activities, and buildings. In such circumstances, deans of women—who were sometimes the only women administrators and faculty—became important agents of educational and social equity for women students, faculty, and staff alike. Although they were originally seen as matrons responsible for their wards’ social welfare, deans of women expanded their responsibilities in the first decades of the twentieth century to include the academic and professional interests of all campus women. Recent studies by Jana Nidiffer on the first midwestern deans and by Carolyn Bashaw on the first southern deans demonstrate how these proactivist individuals worked with, around, and against gender concepts that limited women’s access to higher education and professional employment. Ironically, the very professionalism that legitimated the office of the dean of women also brought its demise. Beginning in the s, the various responsibilities of deans of women—for housing, social organizations, academic advising, and personal and career counseling—were delegated to individual professionals and placed under the administration of a dean of students, usually a man. The province of the dean of women, if maintained, was typically confined to social regulations. Only a handful of colleges and universities have a dean of women today. One of the requirements for assimilating women into the corps of cadets at both VMI and the Citadel was the addition of women administrators whose roles and responsibilities very much resembled those of the pioneering deans profiled by Nidiffer and Bashaw. Indeed, at the Citadel, Suzanne Ozment, dean of undergraduate studies, was specifically given the additional title of dean of women. Yet, at both VMI and the Citadel, cadets resented efforts to single them out as women. Ozment noted that few women sought her out for assistance or advice. Women’s support groups, to be successful, had to be disguised as something else. At the Citadel, for instance, Nancy Mace formed a women’s Bible-study group that “incidentally” included discussions of women’s issues on campus. Black women at coeducational colleges have difficulty finding role models, . Carolyn Terry Bashaw, “Stalwart Women”: A Historical Analysis of Deans of Women in the South (New York and London: Teachers College Press, ); Jana Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York and London: Teachers College Press, ). . Bashaw, “Stalwart Women”; Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women. . Ozment, interview.

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whether they are student leaders, faculty mentors, or administrative personnel. In a study called Black Women in the Academy published in , author after author bemoaned the difficulties black women face in a culture that remains white and male. According to a questionnaire sent out by the Project on the Status and Education of Women, “black women faculty members and administrators do not perceive themselves and their concerns as integrated into the missions, goals, and social structures of college campuses.” Although respondents at HBCUs experienced less racism than those at historically white institutions, they still faced gender discrimination. Regardless of the type of school, black women held fewer senior administrative positions and received fewer promotions and lower salaries than their male counterparts. Black women were frustrated by the tendency for others to attribute their accomplishments to affirmative action. They were frequently told that being black and female gave them a double advantage in academic hires. Yet a study on affirmative action by Robert J. Menges and William H. Exum for the Journal of Higher Education reveals the opposite: black and female were “multiple negatives.” Similarly, a study by Eric George for the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights concludes that although the state hired record numbers of women and blacks in the years between  and , the number of women awarded tenure actually declined during the period. For black women, the gains were negligible. The use of affirmative action to achieve academic equity remains one of the most controversial aspects of educational policy in the twenty-first-century South (and indeed the nation). In the mid-s, President Johnson issued a series of executive orders that encouraged federal contractors to consider racial diversity (and later gender diversity) in their recruiting, hiring, and promoting policies. Colleges were encouraged to offer some sort of preferred treatment to previously disadvantaged groups. Given the educational gaps brought about by centuries of discriminatory practices, such considerations for minorities and women were seen as providing a necessary “transition . Lois Benjamin, ed., Black Women in the Academy: Promises and Perils (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ); quote from Yolanda T. Moses, “Black Women in Academe: Issues and Strategies,” in Black Women in the Academy, ed. Benjamin, . . Menges and Exum, “Barriers to the Progress of Women and Minority Faculty, Journal of Higher Education : (March–April ): –; Saliwe M. Kawewe, “Black Women in Diverse Academic Settings: Gender and Racial Crimes of Commission and Omission in Academia,” in Black Women in the Academy, ed. Benjamin, –; Myrtis Hall Mosley, “Black Women Administrators in Higher Education: An Endangered Species,” Journal of Black Studies : (March ): –.

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period between actual past deficiencies of major proportions and potential future achievements of true equality of opportunity.” Opponents of affirmative action contended that such preferences violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the  Civil Rights Act: “Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake.” In the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (), the Supreme Court ruled that the University of California at Davis’s special admissions program was unconstitutional because it set aside a specified number of slots for minority applicants. However, the justices did not find all affirmative actions suspect. They conceded that “the State has a substantial interest that legitimately may be served by a properly devised admissions program involving the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin.” Thus, colleges could establish policies to promote a diverse student body; these policies simply could not “insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates.” Significantly, the justices in Bakke noted, “Because the special admissions program involved is a racial classification, the Supreme Court [of California] held itself bound to apply strict scrutiny.” If, as legal commentators have claimed, Virginia established strict-scrutiny considerations for gender as well, are academic preferences related to gender also suspect? The California legislature concluded this was the case in their response to Bakke. A  amendment to the state constitution forbade “the use of racial, ethnic, or gender preferences by public colleges and other state agencies.” Some opponents of affirmative action have argued that there is little scientific proof that racial or ethnic diversity benefits students. In the Michigan case of Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al., heard before the district court in , the plaintiffs contended “that ‘diversity’ and ‘academic freedom’ are not compelling governmental interests that can ever justify the use of race in the admissions process.” A similar case, Smith v. University of Washington, was brought against the university’s law school in . Three white students claimed that they were denied admission due to racially discriminatory admissions . “Making Affirmative Action Work in Higher Education,” Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, , quoted in Catharine R. Stimpson, “It Is Time to Rethink Affirmative Action,” Chronicle of Higher Education (January , ). . Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,  U.S.  (). . Ibid.; Peter Schmidt, “In a Largely Symbolic Act, U. of California Regents Rescind Their Ban on Affirmative Action,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May , ); see also Michael Greve, “Affirmative Action Is on the Rocks, Thanks to College Leaders,” Chronicle Review (April , ): B–.

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policies. Here, too, the plaintiffs questioned “() whether educational diversity is a compelling governmental interest that meets the requirement of ‘strict scrutiny’ for race-conscious measures under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; and () whether race may be considered only for remedial purposes.” Soon after the suit was brought, the State of Washington enacted Initiative Measure , declaring that the “state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” When the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in December  that as long as they did not use quotas institutions could use race as a factor in admissions, the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court. In May , the United States Supreme Court let stand the appeals court ruling. Recent legal rulings have also challenged gender policies at southern universities. In , the University of Georgia (UGA), concerned about the growing sexual disparity in its undergraduate student body— percent of which was female—created an admissions formula that gave “bonus points” to borderline applicants (about  percent of all freshmen) who were male. Sex was not the only award criteria. Borderline applicants were also given special consideration for being minorities, having parents who were alumni, or for coming from poor and rural areas of the state. Jennifer L. Johnson, a white woman from Jonesboro, Georgia, filed a lawsuit, claiming that she was denied admission in the fall of  “because of her sex and race.” Johnson’s suit was the third filed against Georgia by attorney A. Lee Parks Jr. who contended that the university illegally used race for admissions decisions. Although the university quickly announced that it was dropping the gender preference and admitting Johnson, school officials wanted further review of racial preferences. The university chancellor, Stephen R. Portch, explained that the school was looking at precollegiate initiatives that would address the educational shortcomings of poor and rural youth (large numbers of whom were black). . Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al., no. – (E.D. Mich.); Smith v. University of Washington, no. – (th Cir. ); Ben Gose, “Supreme Court Declines to Review Affirmative Action in Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May , ). . “Men Get Boost to Attend University of Georgia,” Augusta Chronicle, November , ; Joan Stroer, “University Drops Male Student Preference,” Augusta Chronicle, August , ; Doug Cumming, “Texas, California, Washington, and Now Georgia: Federal Judge Sides with White Student in Admissions Dispute,” Black Issues in Higher Education : (February , ): –.

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On July , , the Eleventh United States District Court considered Jackson’s case with those of two other white females also denied admission to the University of Georgia. The justices noted that the “plaintiffs and defendant agree that . . . the standard for finding gender discrimination under Title IX is the same as Title VI’s standard for racial discrimination, which is identical to the Equal Protection Clause’s standard for racial classifications— i.e., strict scrutiny.” This meant that UGA’s use of racial and gender bonus points in “the promotion of diversity in higher education” must be based on the “compelling interest” of redressing the effects of previous racial and gender discrimination. The district court concluded that Georgia had failed to prove that its admissions policy goal of diversity served a compelling governmental interest. Instead, UGA’s use of racial and gender bonus points seemed to “rationalize proportionalism,” a practice ruled unconstitutional in previous affirmative action cases. The only schools still required to meet diversity quotas, it seems, are HBCUs. In , Maryland asked its four HBCUs “to set a numerical goal for enrolling white students”; Mississippi required its three HBCUs “to enroll student bodies that are at least  percent nonblack.” These institutions plan to offer special programs and scholarships to attract nonblack students. However, scholarships earmarked for white students have been challenged in the courts, and even though they have been justified as promoting desegregation, the constitutionality of such awards continues to be an issue. And if race and gender are equally subject to strict scrutiny, will historically allfemale institutions be required to make similar concessions to males for diversity? In an essay on affirmative action in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Catharine Stimpson suggests that one way to ensure that the gates of higher education remain open for black students is to nurture the HBCUs. These schools, the overwhelming majority of which are located in the South, lead the way in the production of advanced degrees for minority students. And most of these students are black females. “At Howard and Hampton, Spelman . Johnson v. Board of Regents of University System of Georgia,  F. Supp. d  (S.D. Ga., ). An earlier ruling in the United States District Court warned, “[B]ecause the amorphous nature of the term ‘diversity’ is so easily exploited, it can be readily misused to reach otherwise impermissible ends. Thus, while affirmative action proponents may hoist the familiar flag of ‘diversity,’; their true goal may lie in achieving constitutionally disfavored proportional representation (e.g. racial balancing)” (Tracy and Green v. Board of Regents et al.,  F. Supp. d  [U.S. Dist. ]). . Sara Hebel, “A New Push to Integrate Public Black Colleges,” Chronicle of Higher Education (June , ): A.

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and Fisk,” Stimpson notes, “are many of the next generation of black scholars, researchers, and teachers.” Yet the Mississippi case of United States v. Fordice () rejected the plaintiffs’ request for increased funding to HBCUs as a remedy for past inequities. “If we understand private petitioners to press us to order the upgrading of Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State,” the justices wrote, “solely so that they may be publicly financed, exclusively black enclaves by private choice, we reject that request. The State provides these facilities for all its citizens, and it has not met its burden under Brown to take affirmative steps to dismantle its prior de jure system when it perpetuates a separate, but ‘more equal’ one.” One remedy posited by the justices in the Fordice case was to merge neighboring institutions with duplicate programs. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring statement, noted, “It would be ironic, to say the least, if the institutions that sustained blacks during segregation were themselves destroyed in an effort to combat its vestiges.” Mississippi’s historically black institutions were joined by the historically female MUW in arguing that such mergers would decrease rather than increase diversity in public higher education. The settlement of the Fordice case in the spring of  seemed to put the burden for vestigial problems of segregation on HBCUs. Mississippi’s four predominantly black universities were promised new moneys for programs and facilities, but these funds were tied to their enrollments of nonblack students (and only one of the institutions even approached the  percent figure required by the courts). When historically white institutions were not given similar targets for enrolling black students, black educators cried foul. The state, they concluded, only “oppose[d] affirmative action when it [came] to improving the life opportunities of African-American students.” Elias Blake Jr., writing in the Journal of Negro Education, warns educators to be careful not to equate desegregation with educational equality. Statistics tracing degree attainment by black students since desegregation in fact demonstrate the very opposite. “No state in which the percentage and number of degrees being earned by Blacks in the HBCUs dropped were able to show any progress toward reducing the inequality between Whites and Blacks in the number and percentage of graduates.” Ending separate education, in

. Stimpson, “Time to Rethink”; United States v. Fordice,  U.S.  (). . Sara Hebel, “A Settlement and More Division in Mississippi,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May , ): A. See also Hebel, “Miss. Desegregation Plan Would Set Racial Enrollment Goals,” Chronicle of Higher Education (February , ): A; and Hebel, “Preliminary Deal Is Struck in Mississippi Desegregation Case,” Chronicle of Higher Education (April , ).

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other words, does not necessarily result in equal educational opportunities. Indeed, Blake contends, the situation often deteriorates. “When southern states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi use ‘separate but equal’ rhetoric to persuade judges that making amends for cheating the students of its historically Black colleges is constitutionally offensive, their rhetoric must be viewed . . . as the contemporary version of a century-old rationale for not spending adequate money on the education of Black children and youth.” Are new and improved “separate but equal” policies needed to compensate for the racial and gender inequities of the past? The very institutions that were delegated second-class status by segregation seem least willing to accommodate sex- and race-blind integration policies. MUW and TWU still proclaim their special mission to educate women, HBCUs their special mission to nurture African Americans. The Citadel and VMI, on the other hand, describe themselves as coeducational military schools. Historically white and male institutions proclaim their commitment to educational diversity and highlight their programs in ethnic and women’s studies. How do we account for such a strange turn of events? The flagship universities of the southern states have historically shown little interest in the empowerment of women or minorities. Legal challenges rather than philosophical principles led them to abandon racially and sexually exclusive policies. Supreme Court rulings may have ended segregation, but changes were often more in the letter rather than in the spirit of the law. The region’s women’s colleges and HBCUs hope to justify their separatism by demonstrating their ability to provide students with the chance to compete on equal terms in a world, to paraphrase George Orwell, where some are still more equal than others. To requote one of the students who opposed the admission of men to TWU, “it is an issue of power. Men have it, women don’t. . . . White men don’t need an institution to ‘focus’ on themselves, they can do that anywhere they want. . . . Let’s not forget that the argument of separate is not equal does not make sense in a vacuum.” United States v. Virginia et al. reopened the century-long debate over the relative merits of “separate but equal.” Opponents of coeducation used arguments previously employed to confine blacks to separate and unequal educational institutions. Indeed, gender issues at MUW, TWU, VMI, or the Citadel cannot be discussed without reference to southern history. The region . Blake, “Is Higher-Education Desegregation a Remedy for Segregation but Not Educational Inequality? A Study of the Ayers v. Mabus Desegregation Case,” Journal of Negro Education : (autumn ): , . . Tawwater-King, “A Place of Our Own.”

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held fast to rigid conceptions of manhood and womanhood intricately linked to its plantation past. The legal cases that struck down single-gender education at the public expense repeatedly referenced earlier suits that found racially segregated institutions unconstitutional. Stereotypes of women held by opponents of coeducation resembled those of blacks held by opponents of integration. And the same compensatory arguments justify the continued existence of historically black and women’s colleges and universities. Debates over “separate but equal” dominated southern higher education for much of the twentieth century and seem likely to continue to do so in the twenty-first.

s The Changing Character of Farm Life   

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wentieth-century southern women participated in a profound transformation. In , the average southern woman lived in the countryside. By , the U.S. Census Bureau classified only  percent of southern women as rural residents. Born into a rural agricultural world, many died in an urban industrial milieu. Over the course of the century, thousands of rural families left the land, forcing women to reorder their lives in unfamiliar settings. Even those women who remained on the land found daily life completely transformed. As Texas farm woman Leota Kuykendall put it, “Farm life of later years . . . was a completely different kind of farm life.”

. The author thanks the Converse College Faculty Development Committee and Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History for providing funding to make much of the research for this article possible. Special thanks belong to Rebecca Sharpless, Lois Myers, and Becky Shulda at the Institute for Oral History for all their assistance and to Jenny Dunn for her suggestions for an earlier draft of this article. Thanks also to Dwayne Cox and Martin Ollif in the Special Collections of the Ralph B. Draughon Library at Auburn University and to Bonnie Ledbetter in the library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Figures compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States,  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), ; and Historical Statistics of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), laser disk file. Kuykendall, interview by Anne Radford Philips, Waco, three occasions from February  to March , , transcript in Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco (hereafter IOH). This article includes the thirteen Confederate states in any statistics for “the South.” In ,  percent of southern women lived in rural areas.

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elissa alker

Southern Farm Women at the Turn of the Century In the early twentieth century, the southern countryside was a place of great variety. Women lived on Mississippi Delta cotton farms, Virginia tobacco farms, Texas dairy farms, and Tennessee subsistence farms. Some rural women enjoyed great prosperity as landowners, while others suffered great poverty as sharecroppers. In the South, a place of often overlooked ethnic diversity, Cherokee women resided on the Qualla Reservation in North Carolina, German and Czech immigrant women farmed in central Texas, and white and black women lived everywhere in the countryside. Yet regardless of her class, race, or the type of farming in which her family engaged, the seasonal rhythms of the land and the needs of her family dominated a woman’s life. The precarious and unpredictable southern agricultural economy forced southern women to become experts in doing without, making do, and stretching scarce resources. All these skills would be useful in dealing with twentiethcentury transformation. The lives of rural southern women resembled those of farm women in other parts of the country in many ways. Like their southern sisters, the wives of midwestern grain farmers, New England dairy farmers, and western ranchers confronted economic hardship and structural changes in agriculture. Rural women outside the South also focused their efforts on meeting the needs of their families. A number of factors nonetheless made the southern experience distinctive. The crop-lien system locked a great number of farm families into an endless cycle of poverty and debt. Industrial development lagged behind in the South, so opportunities for off-farm jobs were limited. Southern segregation and entrenched discrimination circumscribed the lives of rural African American women more than their white counterparts, and the South’s peculiar racial caste system shaped the lives of women of both races in myriad ways. Southern economic problems forced farm women to find creative ways to cope with rural life. Delilah Woodruff, a white farm woman from Sevier

. Recent work on the lives of southern rural women includes Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); and Melissa Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).

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County, Tennessee, epitomized the innovative early-twentieth-century farmwife who made the most of the resources produced on the farm. Her granddaughter bragged that Delilah could make use of every part of a hog “except its squeal.” While her husband combined farming their steep acreage in the Great Smoky Mountains with logging work for a nearby lumber company, Delilah provided most of the family’s subsistence. Spring and summer usually found her in the garden or the kitchen. Her garden provided fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the summer, and she dried the surplus for the winter months. She raised chickens and cows and bartered her eggs and butter for the sugar, salt, and coffee that she could not produce on the farm. In the fall, Woodruff and her husband killed the hogs that they had fattened during the summer, and she smoked hams and made sausage. Woodruff spent the quieter winter months carding and spinning the wool sheared from her sheep to knit socks for the children and sewing most of the family’s clothing. At times, to supplement her family’s cash income, she took in workers from the lumber camps as boarders. Deola Mayberry Adams’s mother also found it necessary to supplement her family’s cash income. The wife of a black landowning farmer in central Texas, she kept the house, raised a garden, and preserved food for her family. Landowning gave black farm families like Adams’s some measure of independence, but it did not guarantee prosperity. Often African Americans owned less-fertile land—the only land whites had been willing to sell them— and often their farms were too small to support a large family. Frequently, economic necessity compelled black women, landowners and tenants alike, to work off the farm. Deola Adams recalled that her mother supplemented the family’s income by doing domestic work for various white women in the nearby village of Gatesville, a common practice among rural southern black women. Others performed day labor in the fields for white planters. Women like Adams did triple duty: caring for children and household, pitching in with farmwork, and performing off-farm work to supplement the family income. Seasonal rhythms and the needs of her family also dominated Sally Turner Page’s life. The wife of a white sharecropper in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, Page focused most of her efforts on caring for her nine children. . Wilma Cope Williamson, interview by author, Waco, July , , transcript in McClung Historical Collection, Lawson-McGhee Library, Knoxville (hereafter MHC); Florence Cope Bush, Dorie: Woman of the Mountains (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ). Bush and Williamson were Woodruff’s granddaughters. . Adams, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, Gatesville, Tex., August , , IOH.

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But her family’s landless status meant she had fewer resources to stretch. She also managed the disruption of frequent moves—twenty of them between  and . At each of the family’s sharecropping farms, her husband and the oldest children cared for the cotton crop, while Page gardened, preserved food, and struggled to keep a series of substandard tenant houses clean. She also milked a small herd of cows and sold her surplus milk and vegetables to supplement the farm income. Like Sally Page, many early-twentieth-century southern tenant farm women faced the additional burden of frequent moves. Landowners saw the frequent moves of tenants as a sign of shiftlessness and moral defect, but to tenants, moving to a new farm was an attempt to improve their own financial or material circumstances. Tenants moved for a better house, better land, or a fairer landlord. Historian Jacqueline Jones has shown that between  and ,  to  percent of tenant farm families moved in a given year and that whites moved more often than blacks—probably because they faced less discrimination and thus had a better chance to improve their tenure status by moving. Not only did the moves require an endless round of packing, unpacking, and settling into new houses, but tenant farm families often found it hard to engage in the social life of the new community. In her landmark study of white North Carolina tenant farm women, sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood found that most attended church occasionally but few regularly. A few were involved in home-demonstration club work, but most women who tried club work gave it up because they lacked the time to participate or they did not feel comfortable with more prosperous neighbors and those whom they did not know. Already isolated far from town, women were often acutely lonely in this rootless existence. More important, when a family did not know friends and neighbors, they could not turn to them for help in times of crisis. The help of neighbors often proved central to a family’s health and happiness in a rural community. Another central-Texas farm woman, Mary Hanak Simcik, immigrated with her parents to the United States from Czechoslovakia when she was seven. In Texas, the family found a familiar

. Ryan Alexander Page, Our Way of Life: The Odyssey of a Farm Family (Fairfax, Va.: Wallace and Sons Printing, ), . . Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, ), –; Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, ), .

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culture and community support by settling on a rented farm in a Czech community near West, Texas. Simcik’s father died six months after their arrival, but her mother and her fourteen-year-old brother continued to farm, raising cotton for sale, corn and sugarcane to feed the livestock, and a garden for the family’s use. “What we didn’t raise we didn’t buy much of,” Simcik noted. “But you had to buy coffee, sugar, . . . those things you could not raise.” Simcik’s family belonged to a neighborhood meat club. Farm families who participated in this arrangement took turns killing a cow and sharing cuts of meat with neighbors. Each week a family would slaughter an animal and share the meat. Because they had no way to preserve beef without refrigeration, the beef club enabled participating families to enjoy fresh meat most of the year. By joining the beef club, Simcik’s family adopted a coping strategy common to rural southern communities: the mutual aid network. Rural families shared scarce material resources and labor through complex and mostly informal networks of mutual exchange. The beef club provides only one example of a mutual aid network. The most common networks involved labor exchanges or the swapping of farm produce. Black Texan Maggie Lanham Washington told an interviewer, “People in those days just came to one another’s rescue. That was one of those things that they would do automatically: Jim’s going to kill a hog today; we’re going over to Jim’s [to help].” Alice Owens Caulfield, another African American farm woman from Texas, described her family’s exchanges with others: “There were folks who raised greens. In green time, people pass them off from one to the other. You never had to worry if you didn’t grow it—somebody else was, and they’d send it to you.” Families also helped each other in times of crisis. For example, white eastern Tennessean Laverne Farmer recalled that in her community, people sat up with the neighborhood sick and collected household goods for victims of house fires. “If people around needed things, why they’d help each other out,” she explained. “They just shared what they had.” Irby Arnett, a Virginia farmwife, recalled that in her rural community, a “death meant neighbors bringing food to the home of the bereaved and most of the time sitting up all night where the body rested.” Although mutual aid networks were often as segregated as the larger southern society, neighborly helpfulness sometimes crossed racial lines. Tennessean Edna Spencer described how her great-grandmother would nurse black and white women in the neighbor. Simcik, interview by LaWanda Ball, Waco, November , , transcript in Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco (hereafter TC).

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hood through illness and explained that sometimes white women returned the favor. “Outsiders would have some difficulty with this,” she noted. “It’s best understood when you realize that there were good people in that valley, and they came in more than one color.” Rural southern women maintained the social ties that formed the bedrock of mutual aid networks. Women organized the informal visiting that built ties among neighboring families as well as more formal school and church activities such as Christmas pageants or “dinner-on-the-ground” after Sunday services. When an interviewer asked Alabama farmwife Dolly Evans about the roles that women played in a rural community, she replied, “Well, it was to visit the sick, care for them and sit up with them at night. Day after day [my mother] would make a trip to help take care” of community members. Maintaining mutual aid networks was an important part of southern farm women’s work. Churches provided social centers where women built their ties to neighbors. Except for occasional references to God’s help in surviving the Great Depression years, rural women rarely tell oral history interviewers about the role of faith in their lives, but they often refer to the churches of their youth. Churches provided community social centers. When asked what she liked about going to church, rural Texan Myrtle Irene Calvert Dodd replied, “[It was] just where everybody else was. Everybody went; that was the social thing. . . . We had the church at our [Methodist] church one Sunday and the Baptist the next and everybody went to the Baptist church and everybody come to the Methodist when we had those.” At church, farm women found a respite from the daily grind of farm living and the company of other women. The lives of farm women provide ample testimony to the importance of southern farm women’s work to the family economy at the beginning of the twentieth century. As rural Louisiana farm woman Billy Lee Jones put it, “A . Washington, interview by Doni Von Ryswyk, Waco, three occasions from March  to May , , TC; Caulfield, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, Waco, eight occasions from January  to April , , IOH; Farmer, interview by Melissa Walker, Maryville, Tenn., August , , MHC; Arnett, interview by Dean Reeves, Abingdon, Va., November , , Extension Homemakers Oral History Project, tapes in Special Collections, Dacus Library, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, S.C. (hereafter EHOHP); Spencer quoted in Walker, All We Knew, . . Evans, interview by Marilyn Jones, Liberty Hill, Ala., spring , Oral History Collection, University of Alabama at Birmingham (hereafter UABOHC). . Dodd, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, Waco, four occasions from August  to September , , TC.

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man never made a living alone on the farm. He always had to have his wife helping him.” Southern farm women provided most of the family’s subsistence. They sold surplus farm products, kept boarders, and worked as day laborers to supplement the family’s cash income. They even worked in the fields, although the amount and types of field work they did varied according to their socioeconomic class, their child-care responsibilities, and their personal preferences. Sally Page worked in the fields when her children were small, but withdrew when the older ones were able to replace her. Mary Simcik and her sister chopped and picked cotton and corn, as did Rubie Evans’s mother. Deola Adams recalled that her mother took the children to the fields with her when she chopped and picked cotton. Many rural southerners have memories of being dragged through cotton fields on the tail end of their mothers’ cotton sacks or staying in homemade playpens left at the edge of the fields. Women performed field work from necessity and sometimes by choice. Farm women’s attitudes toward field work varied. Margaret Hagood found that seven-eighths of the North Carolina tenant farm women that she interviewed preferred field work to housework. Most showed an extensive knowledge of the farming operation. Texan Leota Kuykendall recalled that her grandmother felt “put upon if she couldn’t go out in the fields. She wasn’t staying home. She was going to be out there where the activity was. . . . But my mother never cared that much about being a farmer’s wife. Her joy came later when she could go to town and work.” Hagood found that class aspirations shaped some women’s attitudes toward field work. She interviewed one woman who, “desirous of identifying herself with the ‘town’ women of a small village four miles away, insisted that she knew nothing of what went on outside of the house, which was her domain.” Even women who worked in the fields tried to avoid the heaviest work, especially plowing. White women often associated plowing with black women’s work, and some black women found a badge of status in the ability to avoid plowing. Black Texan Alice Caulfield’s earliest memory of field work was chopping cotton, but she insisted that women never plowed. When asked why, she said, “The mules pulled the plow. . . . No woman was going to be struggling [with mules]— that wasn’t her job. Men did that. Women didn’t have nothing to do with the [live]stock. Her place was in the home.” . Jones, interview by Doris Ashley, West Monroe, La., May , , EHOHP; Adams, interview. . Hagood, Mothers of the South, , –; Kuykendall, interview; Caulfield, interview.

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The Southern Agricultural Economy at the Turn of the Century Prosperous or struggling, landowning or tenant, black or white, hard work usually dominated the lives of southern farm women of the early twentieth century. Early in the century, the everyday work of these farm women differed little from that of their mothers and grandmothers. But the rural South was profoundly transformed in the twentieth century—transformed by railroads and industrialization, economic depression and ecological disaster, governmental intervention and a changing agricultural economy. Delilah Woodruff, Deola Adams’s mother, Mary Simcik, and Sally Page experienced disconcerting and seemingly endless change. In the years after the Civil War, farmers in most areas of the South settled into a one-crop world. In Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina the crop was often tobacco, and in parts of Louisiana, the crops were sugarcane and prairie rice. In most other parts of the South that staple crop was cotton, and as one historian has put it, “cotton was a cruel tyrant.” A high world demand for cotton and southern farmers’ familiarity with growing the staple crop made it attractive. Unfortunately, as cotton production grew, prices predictably fell. Cotton depleted the soil resources quickly in the days before chemical fertilizers and virtually destroyed thousands of acres of southern farmland. The farmers who planted this worn-out land saw steadily declining crop yields. During most years early in the century, cotton was not particularly profitable. Poor soil and an unpredictable market quickly impoverished many of the region’s small landowners. The arrival of the boll weevil, an insect that destroyed cotton crops, worsened the situation for cotton farmers. The boll weevil made its way from Texas to Georgia between  and  and devastated already poor farmers. In bad years, many mortgaged their farms for operating capital. Unable to pay off these debts, many subsequently lost their land. Some farmers sold acreage in an attempt to stay afloat, but succeeded only in reducing their cropland. In , the average South Carolina farm was only seventy-seven acres, hardly enough to support a family by raising cotton. Only in Virginia and Texas did average farm size exceed one hundred acres. Tenancy continued to grow in the twentieth century as a cycle of overproduction, declining cotton prices, and indebtedness sucked millions of southern cotton farmers, black and white, into farm tenancy and the crop-lien system. Farm tenancy reached  percent in Tennessee by  and exceeded  percent in South Carolina. By ,  percent of southern

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black farmers were tenants. Holding on to the land did not guarantee prosperity. Small landowners were often no better off than tenants. Although independent from landlords, they were often deeply in debt and were dependent on outside wage work to remain financially afloat. Whites as well as blacks struggled. African American sharecropper Rosa McCowan Tensley recalled that many of her neighbors were poor whites who “didn’t have nothing, they worked on halves.” She explained that the reason for this poverty was that white landlords “just wanted everything they could get—and you, nothing.” Nonetheless, fewer blacks than whites owned their own land, and they generally worked smaller farms, which made it hard for them to support their often large families. For example, in , eastern Tennessee’s black farmers worked approximately fifty-nine acres, while whites farmed an average of ninety-eight acres. In Anderson County, South Carolina, blacks farmed an average of thirty-five acres compared to whites’ fifty-one and one-half acres. Many southerners resisted diversifying their farming and turned to parttime or seasonal off-farm work rather than changing to another crop. To make matters worse, families often devoted so much time and so many resources to one-crop farming that they raised little of their own subsistence. This in turn forced them to buy most of their food, thus increasing their dependence on landlords and furnishing merchants who advanced them credit against the harvest. Without this credit, croppers might not eat. Sometimes landowners refused to allow sharecroppers to raise a garden because they feared that gardening would consume acres and labor that would otherwise be devoted to cotton. Rosa Tensley recalled an Alabama landowner who insisted that he was entitled to half the produce of her garden if she planted it on his property. She stubbornly refused to share the proceeds of her labor. Instead, she gardened on nearby land that her father owned. Life in the mountain South was somewhat different from the monoculture areas of the Deep South, the Piedmont, and the Texas prairie. To some contemporary observers, late-nineteenth-century southern Appalachian farmers embodied the independent yeoman. Most southern mountaineers owned their land and engaged in subsistence farming while producing a small amount for the market. The most prosperous Appalachian farmers enjoyed considerable . United States Census of Agriculture,  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), vol. , pt. , compiled from pp. –, –. . Tensley, interview by Stephen C. Harvey, Notasulga, Ala., February , , Auburn Folklore and Oral History Collection, Auburn University, Auburn, Ala. Figures compiled from Census of Agriculture, , vol. , pt. , pp. –, –.

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independence and prosperity, but the poorest struggled to eke out a living on marginal upland soil. Whatever independence and isolation that existed in the mountains gradually eroded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As timber and coal companies discovered the riches available in the southern Appalachians, company towns grew up in the timbering and mining regions. Mountain people went to work for these companies and eventually became dependent on the wages they earned. Some families also succumbed to pressure to sell their land to lumber companies and miners. Mining and lumbering caused environmental degradation that affected neighboring farmers. Clear-cutting triggered massive erosion. Railroad engines and logging equipment sparked devastating fires, and mineral-laden runoff from mines contaminated streams. Settlement workers, young college-educated women from urban areas who came to the mountains to perform social work among the poor mountaineers, arrived on the heels of the lumber and mining companies. For example, in , Katherine Pettit and May Stone set up a settlement school in Hindman, Kentucky. These young women sought to bring education and middleclass values to the mountain people. Settlement schools, like outside capitalist interests, brought new ideas and awakened new ambitions in mountain young people. In spite of multiple forces pushing mountain families to become more embroiled in a cash economy, many mining and lumbering families maintained their ties to the land. Like Delilah Woodruff’s husband, who logged part-time while she and the children did much of the farmwork, William R. Payne recalled that his mother raised the family’s subsistence on their tiny West Virginia farm while his father worked in the mines. Families who resided in company coal towns even kept chickens, cows, and gardens to avoid complete dependence on the mine owner and his company store.

Agriculture’s Golden Age The first two decades of the twentieth century have been called the “golden age of agriculture.” During those years, national farm income more than doubled, and demand for farm products soared. Rural people seized the op. David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics and Culture of an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . William R. Payne, interview by Ella Gibson, n.p., November , , Oral History of Appalachia, Marshall University, Huntington, W.Va.

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portunity to enter the economic mainstream and eagerly used their increased profits to buy consumer products, including radios and cars, that significantly reduced rural isolation. Still, the golden age was considerably less golden in the rural South where tenancy remained entrenched and racism limited opportunities for black farm families. Women living on southern farms before World War I rarely recalled this period as an era of marked prosperity. Nonetheless, the early decades of the twentieth century saw the beginnings of transformation in the rural southern countryside. Tenuously connecting isolated rural areas to the outside world, railroads invaded many small hamlets. Trains brought outsiders and consumer goods to the countryside. Mail order companies, general stores, and peddlers distributed manufactured products widely. Southerners welcomed these goods as a link to the larger mass culture developing in the United States and sought new ways to generate the cash income they needed to buy consumer products. During the so-called golden age, reformers and governmental officials began to attend to the problems of southern agriculture. The period saw the emergence of a rural reform movement led by urbanites concerned that wholesale flight from the land foreshadowed a looming food shortage. Country Life Movement reformers, named for President Theodore Roosevelt’s  Country Life Commission to study rural problems, believed the key to improving farm life lay in convincing farmers to adopt scientific agricultural practices. As a result, they focused their efforts on rural education. Not only did they seek to improve rural schools, but they also taught farm men and women better agricultural and homemaking practices. Most of this adult education took the form of agricultural extension work. Pioneered in Texas in  by a scientist named Seaman Knapp, agricultural extension work took trained “extension agents” directly to the farmer to teach him new and better practices. Knapp’s methods gained the attention of the Rosenwald Fund, a Sears-Roebuck executive’s charity, and the Rockefeller family’s General Education Board. Both philanthropic organizations funded projects designed to improve southern health and education. These agencies provided funding for the expansion of agricultural extension work in the South, including separate programs for black farmers. In , Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act that made extension work part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) bureaucracy by providing federal matching funds to help states increase extension programming. Agricultural extension agents worked with landowning southern farmers to improve their productivity and thus increase their profits. They

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encouraged farmers to adopt modern soil-conservation methods, purchase hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers, and specialize in one or two staple crops. Agricultural agents’ female counterparts, home-demonstration agents, encouraged farmwives to be effective helpmeets for their farmer husbands. Home agents taught farm women improved gardening and food preservation practices, techniques for providing the family with a balanced diet yearround, and ways to inexpensively make fashionable clothing or home accessories. These projects aimed to help farm families live in ways that more closely resembled the models provided by an emerging mass culture and thus to make farm living more attractive. Many farm families eagerly adopted the ideas of extension agents, but others viewed the so-called experts with suspicion and resisted attempts to change farming and homemaking practices.

World War I and the Rural South With the outbreak of World War I in Europe, demand for American farm products skyrocketed. When the United States entered the war, a number of governmental programs encouraged farmers to increase their production in order to feed war-torn Europe and to supply the American army. The easing of farm credit strictures enabled farmers to borrow large sums of cash for land, livestock, seed, and chemical fertilizers. Agricultural extension agents promoted these shifts in farming practices as a patriotic duty, and many southern landowners gladly responded to the promise of higher profits. During World War I, southern farmers took advantage of high profits to improve their lives, and especially to improve their farms. They bought additional acreage in hopes of increasing their long-term profits. Although a few purchased tractors and other equipment to help them work additional land and to replace fleeing laborers, southern farmers, in general, mechanized more slowly than the rest of the country. The brief rise in farm prices was not the war’s only impact on rural southerners. The war forced farmwives to cope with food shortages. Although most farm families butchered their own cattle and thus were not affected by the meat shortage, many families bought flour so they felt the wheat shortages more acutely. A child during World War I, Texan Billy Lee Jones recalled “the corn bread we had to eat for breakfast. I loved corn bread and johnny cakes but not for breakfast. It was our custom to have hot biscuits with butter and home grown sorghum syrup.” Her parents taught her that doing without biscuits was her patriotic duty: “My dad would say: ‘This is our sacrifice

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to help our soldiers. Just think of the little children in the war torn land. They don’t have anything to eat and they are starving.’” Some southern farm women faced the distress of having loved ones in military service. Texan Bernice Porter Bostwick Weir recalled that World War I broke out when she was a teen. “We were all upset. . . . It was real distressing.” Her brothers and her husband served. When her brothers enlisted, “It liked to grieve Mama to death. Mama cried nearly all the time, and she cried when she’d get a letter and she’d cry when she didn’t get a letter.” Not only did having sons and neighbors leave for the front cause emotional distress, but the war also took away much-needed farm laborers. Indeed, many people left the land for better opportunities created by war. Black families, in particular, followed the lure of wartime jobs. Northern labor recruiters flooded the South in search of additional workers. They offered free transportation north and the promise of good jobs. The availability of automobiles and improved rural roads that facilitated rural mobility also made it easier for blacks to leave. Between  and , as many as half a million southern blacks left the South. Most were sharecroppers fleeing the poverty and racial violence of the rural South for better opportunities in the industries of the North and West. Blacks fled a segregated rural southern society in which dozens of laws and unwritten rules circumscribed their lives. As in southern towns and cities, country schools and other public facilities were divided along racial lines by law, and blacks were invariably assigned inferior facilities. Elaborate naming rituals marked racial boundaries: whites insisted that blacks address them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” but whites rarely honored a black man or woman with honorific titles and often used demeaning generic terms such as “auntie” and “boy” to refer to blacks with whom they interacted. African Americans were expected to knock at the back doors of white homes, and adults of the two races rarely shared meals. These unwritten rules of behavior reinforced white supremacy and reminded blacks of their inferior status. Nonetheless, race relations in the rural South were highly complex and were often negotiated in one-on-one relationships. Behavior that might be accepted from . Jones, interview. . Weir, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, McLennan County, Tex., four occasions from July  to August , , TC. . Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), ; David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .

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some blacks would not be tolerated from others. Some African Americans did not easily accept the established order and challenged the rules. These people might face prosecution in a hostile court system or even violence. Even in the best of situations, southern blacks were subjected to daily and humiliating reminders of their inferior status. They were also denied access to education and the best-paying jobs. Such discrimination gave them powerful incentive to leave when opportunities presented themselves outside the South. In the early years of the century, blacks who did not leave the countryside handled segregation and the ever present threat of racial violence in a variety of ways. Many limited their resistance to subtle forms. They often responded by withdrawing into their own communities to the extent possible. For example, Texan Alice Caulfield noted that she did not patronize white businesses that did not serve blacks equally. “I never was going to accept anything from the back door,” she explained. “We were taught you didn’t do that. If you can’t be served at the front, don’t be served.” Blacks also coped with racism by seeking protection from powerful whites. Another black Texan explained that if things “didn’t go just right, they had a way of going to certain people, you know, white people in the community, and say, ‘Look, this is not right, and this happened and that happened, and we feel like that it would be in all of our interest if this could be corrected.’ And for that cause we were able to avoid any high tension.” In spite of various coping strategies, discrimination, racism, and threats of violence dominated the lives of southern blacks in the early twentieth century. Many eagerly sought new opportunities in southern and northern cities. Single young women left the land in droves for domestic jobs in northern and midwestern cities. Young black men who enlisted in the military often did not come home after their discharge. World War I began the depopulation of the southern countryside.

The Post–World War I Agricultural Depression Rural southerners usually marked the end of World War I as the beginning of the Great Depression. Families who remained on the land in the South enjoyed some prosperity into the first half of . Then, as European farmers began to recover from the wartime disruptions, world demand for . Caulfield, interview; Lonnie Graves, interview by Anne Radford Phillips, Satin, Tex., October , , IOH.

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American farm products and farm prices plummeted. Cotton prices dropped from  cents a pound in the spring of  to . cents by December of the same year. Tobacco fell from . cents a pound to . cents in the same period. Prices recovered slightly after  only to fall again after the onset of worldwide depression in . After World War I, southern farm families were less able to weather the economic downturn than they might have been before the war because they were not as self-sufficient, had higher standards of living, and were often in debt. Farmers who had gone into debt to purchase land or equipment found themselves unable to meet mortgage payments or to pay their taxes. Long before the stock market crash in  signaled the beginning of the Great Depression, thousands of southern farm families had lost their farms to foreclosure. As Kentucky farmwife Mary Fouts put it, “[The Great Depression] was called ‘hard times,’ but to me, I couldn’t tell very much difference because our times was hard anyway. We didn’t have a lot of anything except what we raised on the farm.” Most farm women coped with the agricultural depression by intensifying their strategies to “make do.” They stepped up efforts to provide as much as they could on the farm and to stretch scarce resources—“to use it up, make it over, or wear it out.” Maggie Washington recalled that her mother began to make biscuits with water instead of milk. Rural Arkansan Essie Simmons fed her husband and their three children with her thirty-six laying hens, a milk cow, and a garden. In the summer, she canned huge amounts of food. She sewed for her own family and for neighbors in return for extra fabric. She also relined old coats to earn extra income. Many rural women joined Essie Simmons in seeking opportunities to earn extra money. In Gorgas, Alabama, more than half of the wives in the community had earned some cash during . Most sold eggs, butter, and garden produce. Some kept boarders, did sewing, worked as day laborers on other farms, or took in washing. A few sold fancy quilts. Women also intensified their mutual aid efforts during the hard times of the s and s. Maggie Washington’s mother “had to partly feed the family . Figures compiled from Census of Agriculture,  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), pt. , pp. –; Danbom, Born in the Country, , , ; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture,  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), ; Fouts, interview by Mabel Bartram, London, Ky., November , , EHOHP. . Washington, interview; Simmons, interview by M. Houser, Mulberry, Ark., April , , EHOHP; Paul W. Terry and Verner M. Sims, They Live on the Land: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community (; reprint, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), .

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next door. We shared—we had to share with them.” Literally hundreds of accounts of farm women feeding hoboes can be found in archives throughout the South. Alabama farmwife Elizabeth Harden Lasseter explained, “If this one had something that you didn’t have, if he was growing it, he’d divide it with the other fellow.” In the s, some southern farm families initially responded to the downturn by moving into towns and taking industrial jobs or by combining farming with an off-farm job. Other families moved to lumber camps or coal towns in southern Appalachia or steel mills in northern Alabama. Many migrated to textile towns where the whole family might find jobs in the mills. Tenants and marginal landowners, those with the fewest resources to succeed at farming, were the most likely to adopt this strategy. For many farmers, moving to a company town and taking an off-farm job seemed the best way to improve the lives of wives and daughters. One woman recalled that her father moved the family from a farm to a textile mill town “because he didn’t have nothing much but girls and they had to get out and work like men” on the farm. Textile mill work was easier and less stigmatized than field work for women. Another woman told an interviewer that she “would prefer to live in the country if conditions were favorable, and I owned my own home, with no rent to pay. But under present conditions and circumstances, owning no land, with rent to pay, I would rather live at the mills.” In mines, lumber camps, and textile mills, farm families found wages that were a little better than farming as sharecroppers or marginal landowners, but not much. Some men attempted to work in nearby textile factories  maintain the farm after work and on weekends; others sent their daughters to work in the mills. Kathryn Killian’s father found her a job in a nearby factory, and she found that she preferred the opportunities there. On the farm, she said, “We just scratched out our living, that’s all. We felt [that working in the factory] was what we wanted to do, to get out so we’d have a little more income then.” However, most southerners stayed on the land throughout the depression, and many of those who left farms soon returned. The agricultural depression coincided with downturns in the textile and coal markets, and many . Washington, interview; for a sampling of accounts of feeding hoboes, see French Clark, interview by Melissa Walker, Maryville, Tenn., July , , MHC; Jones, interview; Arnett, interview; Irene Clause, “Autobiographical Tape,” ca. , EHOHP; Lasseter, interview by Milton E. Turner, Gadsden, Ala., May , , UABOHC. . Wright, Old South, New South, –. . Quoted in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ed., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), .

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southern forests had been logged out by the end of the s. The South offered few industrial opportunities, and moving north with a family was an expensive proposition. Moreover, the industrial North was an alien world, miles from family, community support networks, and familiar rhythms of life. Many who had gone to the Midwest for jobs during World War I and the s returned to the South with the onset of the Great Depression. Indeed, many southerners believed that the farm offered far more material security than any job in the city. As Alabaman Elizabeth Lasseter put it, on the farm “you could raise your own food and there was always a little work you could pick up to do.”

New Deal Agricultural Programs The worldwide depression that began in  intensified the suffering of many rural southerners. Thousands who had found jobs in the region’s industries found themselves unemployed. Some returned to family farms, often moving in with parents or in-laws in overcrowded houses on farms too small to support so many people. A severe drought in  and  worsened the disaster. Some families applied for relief, but many local governments defined farmers as constantly employed and thus ineligible for relief—even if they could not earn enough money to pay the family’s bills or raise enough crops for subsistence. When families qualified for relief payments, the aid came with a terrible stigma attached, and neighbors often condemned families on relief as shiftless or lazy. For example, Alabama farmwife Elizabeth Lasseter explained to an interviewer that she knew families who had received free food commodities distributed by the federal government, “but we didn’t have to get any of that because we had plenty of that at home. . . . I sold and done things to buy our flour, but some of them didn’t. They didn’t do anything. They went and got the free food.” Although Lasseter looked down upon farm families who accepted free food from the government, she and her husband plowed up thirty-five acres of cotton in  in order to qualify for Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) crop-reduction payments. Initially hailed as the saving grace for southern farmers, the commodity-based programs of the New Deal failed to alleviate human suffering, especially in the South. Southern landowners like the Lasseters, themselves strapped by the economic depression, quickly . Lasseter, interview. . Ibid.

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grasped the potential for short-term cash payments and long-term higher prices from AAA programs. They calculated that their best chances for a profitable future on the land lay in changing their farming practices, and AAA programs offered a means for achieving this transformation. But sharecroppers found little help from AAA. Although the law required that landowners share their AAA crop-reduction payments with sharecroppers in the same proportion as the sharecroppers shared the crop, many landlords refused to comply. As they removed land from production, many landowners evicted their sharecroppers. Landlords used crop-reduction payments to buy tractors and other equipment that eliminated the need for sharecroppers. Though cotton farmers needed manual laborers to chop and pick cotton, they began to rely on local day laborers rather than year-round sharecroppers. One historian found that in two Black Belt counties of Georgia, the percentage of black farm families who were sharecroppers fell between  and , while the percentage of wage laborers in those counties rose from . to .. At the same time, due to the oversupply of available laborers, daily rates for agricultural laborers fell throughout the South. Rural southerners, displaced in the aftermath of New Deal reforms, recognized the unfair structure of federal programs. In December , Tennessee widow Minnie Adcock wrote to Franklin Roosevelt to appeal for help in finding a new sharecropping situation for herself and her children. Unable to locate even a rental house, Mrs. Adcock lamented, “Well tell me what i am to do what is the poor old tenant going to do i am so worried i cant sleep you had all this done to help the farmer well it shure has got us in a mess i have no home no place to live. . . . If you dont help me, i will haft to live with the dogs.” Some poor southerners did more than appeal to the president for aid. Southern tenant farmers organized to advance their own interests. Even before the advent of New Deal farm programs, the Share Croppers Union (SCU) was established in Alabama with the help of the Communist Party in . The SCU gained members rapidly with the advent of New Deal cropreduction programs. In response to complaints about landowners who cheated their sharecroppers, this organization sought to achieve fair settlements with landowners at harvest time. In , in response to Arkansas tenant farmers’ complaints to USDA officials that landlords were failing to share crop. Wright, Old South, New South, –, ; Danbom, Born in the Country, –. . Adcock to Roosevelt, December , , RG , Records of the Farmers Home Administration, correspondence relating to complaints, – (box ), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

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reduction payments with their tenants, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration began sending checks directly to some Arkansas tenant farmers. Landowners responded by evicting tenant farmers en masse. Fighting back, tenants gathered at Tyronza, Arkansas, to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU). Farmers of both races joined the SCU and the STFU. The organizations relied heavily on the commitment of farm women who fed their families, worked as union organizers, and planned union activities. One such woman was Naomi Williams of Gould, Arkansas. Williams cultivated her own cotton patch, picked cotton for her landlord, worked her own vegetable garden, and taught a school for neighbor children. She told an interviewer that she joined the union because she was tired of working “myself to death” to keep her family together in a society that severely limited opportunities for black children. Although these efforts proved ineffective largely because local officials and the U.S. government supported the rights of landowners over those of sharecroppers, some rural women gained valuable organizing experience, and many rural southerners learned to bridge the racial divide. Some southern people displaced by the Great Depression or New Deal programs became migrant workers. Migrant farmwork developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century. The invention of refrigerated railroad cars in the s fueled a demand for fresh fruits and vegetables in eastern and midwestern cities. At first, recent European immigrants who picked New Jersey crops in season filled migrant jobs. By the early twentieth century, immigrants had assimilated into American culture and found better opportunities in industry. At the same time, economic and climatological forces pushed rural people off the land. Displaced southern sharecroppers provided many growers with another cheap seasonal labor force to harvest their truck crops. During the post–World War I economic disaster, summer south-tonorth migration routes became routine. In the s, the draining of the Everglades and the development of truck farming in southern Florida swelled the demand for cheap farm laborers. Following the harvest north, migrants began in the winter and spring with citrus and vegetable crops in Florida, moved to New Jersey to harvest vegetables in the summer, and harvested fruit in the Carolinas and New England in the fall. By the s, blacks provided the majority of migrant workers. Many lived in the winter or yearround in all-black towns in southern Florida where they supplemented work . Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, ), –; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –.

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in citrus groves and vegetable patches with work in affluent white communities like Boca Raton. Displaced southern tenant farm women found migrant work a miserable life of poverty and exploitation. Migrant workers were usually recruited by labor agents who negotiated with landowners. Although some crew bosses were ethical, many took a large portion of workers’ wages and pocketed the money that landowners provided for food. Excluded from most federal relief programs, migrants had no alternative source of support. When traveling, farmworkers depended on landowners for shelter and often found themselves in housing far worse than anything they had seen on sharecropping land. As they had when sharecropping, whole families worked in the fields. For migrant women, the burden was often overwhelming. They struggled to provide decent meals and clean clothing along the way as well as handle child care because, busy in the fields most of the time, migrant women saved household tasks such as mending and sewing for rainy days. They could not garden or keep livestock, so family diets were limited to whatever cheap foods the family could afford. In their inadequate housing, many migrant mothers cooked over open fires and tried to preserve perishables without electricity or nearby springhouses. The wells available for migrants were often contaminated by privies built close by. Poor nutrition and unsanitary living conditions led to frequent illness. Those unable to work due to sickness lost vital income. Migrant Johnnie Belle Taylor spent the winters of World War II working in the fields around the Belle Glade, Florida, migrant camp while her husband worked in Key West. In the summer, her whole family traveled from farm to farm in Georgia harvesting tobacco, peanuts, and cotton. Migrant workers were not the only group of rural southerners whose depression-era sufferings were overlooked. The , members of the eastern band of the Cherokees, always the subjects of discrimination, also suffered in the economic downturn. Most were subsistence farmers, but in the early decades of the century, many Cherokees had taken jobs in the logging industry. By the late s, many areas of the Great Smoky Mountains were logged out. Other acreage was purchased for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and could not be logged. As lumber camps and mills closed, many Indian men found themselves unemployed and forced to depend exclusively on subsistence farming. Their wives helped fill the gap with income . Jones, Dispossessed, chap. , esp. –; Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. . Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor, –.

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from basket making. Cherokee women had long engaged in basket making for their own use, and in the mid-nineteenth century, they began to supplement family income by bartering and selling their utilitarian vessels to white gardeners and farmers. The American crafts movement of the early twentieth century revived interest in indigenous crafts and encouraged the production of baskets for sale to tourists and to middle-class collectors in urban areas. The growth of tourism in the southern Appalachians and the founding of several cooperatives to market Appalachian crafts provided an expanded market. Cherokee women gathered their basket- and dye-making materials in the forests around their homes and filled the hours between food production and child-care responsibilities with basket weaving. Cherokee weaver Aggie Ross learned to make baskets from her grandmother, and she supplemented her family’s farm subsistence by selling baskets throughout her long life. She recalled her satisfaction in selling her first baskets: “I took my few baskets that I had made and I had enough to buy me a cotton dress and a few other little things at the store—that was the first time I bought myself some thing my selfe [sic] by selling baskets that I had made my self.” The Great Depression took an enormous toll on southern farm women. In spite of their best efforts to stretch scarce resources, earn additional income, and “make do,” the end of the s brought little improvement in the farm economy. Thousands had been forced off the land and into unfamiliar lifestyles. For those who remained in the countryside, landowners and landless alike, agriculture no longer offered opportunities for security or adequate subsistence.

World War II World War II profoundly altered rural southern women’s lives. Even before Pearl Harbor, factories inside and outside the region had begun to increase production and to create new opportunities for employment. New federal minimum-wage policies made industrial jobs more attractive and integrated the southern labor force into the national market. This trend drew people from the land. Movement away from the land accelerated with the coming of World War II. White women and African Americans of both sexes found that doors to better-paying off-farm jobs once closed to them now opened. Young single women sought these new opportunities. For example, Evelyn . Sarah H. Hill, Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), .

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Lewellyn found work as a tool-room clerk in the machine shop at the Aluminum Company of America’s (ALCOA) plant in Blount County, Tennessee. Ima Hoppe Bekkelund, daughter of white central-Texas farmers, took a job in the Owens-Illinois plant in Waco during the war and worked until her marriage five years later. The South’s farm population declined by  percent during World War II, partly as a result of young men joining the war effort and partly as a result of wartime off-farm job opportunities. Farm laborers and sharecroppers made up the majority of those leaving the land permanently. World War II created unprecedented prosperity in the rural South. Farm prices were high, and the booming economy provided plenty of opportunities for off-farm work. Nonetheless, persistent shortages of consumer goods proved frustrating to southern farm people. French Clark noted that the war improved the economy in Blount County, Tennessee, but she added that “money wasn’t so scarce but there was nothing to buy.” Ration stamps are a vivid memory for many rural southern women who struggled to continue running households in spite of the shortages. For farm women who had done without consumer products for years due to poverty, having money but no access to goods proved particularly frustrating.

Mechanization and Capitalist Agriculture World War II also stimulated a revolution in American agricultural productivity that would further transform rural life. Three factors contributed to this revolution: the introduction of improved varieties of crops and animals, made possible largely by advances in genetics; mechanization; and the use of new chemicals to kill weeds and pests and to fertilize the land. The productivity revolution was particularly powerful in the South. If the New Deal had provided landowners with the wherewithal to begin mechanization, World War II created a labor shortage that made mechanization and improved farming methods vital to survival. During the war, landowners found it hard to hire farmhands. Texans Dovie and Etta Carroll recalled that this was a real problem for them. By offering much higher wages, nearby airplane factories hired away the men who had once worked for them. Etta noted, “They left some of the men. We had plenty to work the farm, but . . . . Wright, Old South, New South, ; Lewellyn, interview by Melissa Walker, Greenback, Tenn., August , , MHC; Bekkelund, interview by Lois E. Myers, Woodway, Tex., February , , IOH. . Clark, interview.

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you couldn’t go and get anybody you wanted.” The best workers tended to take better-paying off-farm jobs or move to better jobs in other regions. The introduction of improved mechanical cotton pickers during World War II clinched the southern agricultural transformation. Southern farmers bought tractors and mechanical pickers, used DDT to eliminate the boll weevil and other pests, and adopted new herbicides to eliminate the need to chop cotton by hand. Many southern farmers quit cotton farming and diversified in the s and s, opting for new strains of grains that were more suited to the peculiarities of the southern climate. Others planted orchards or raised livestock. Though many landowners continued to use day laborers on a seasonal basis, the shift to new crops and to the mechanical cotton picker rendered sharecroppers obsolete. As a result, between  and , nearly half a million sharecroppers left the land. Virginia McIntyre, a white woman from Franklin Parish, Louisiana, recalled that when she married, her husband employed twenty-two tenant families on the place, and all work was done by hand or with mules. “As time went on and things changed, after we got tractors instead of mules . . . , we ended up the last few years with one colored man helping him,” she explained to an interviewer in . “Now they can just do it so fast, where it used to take fifteen or twenty to cut hay. . . . Now it’s so much easier.” Governmental agricultural programs also contributed to the shift to largescale commercial farming. A complex allotment system, one legacy of the New Deal, assigned each landowner a specific number of acres for overproduced commodities like cotton, rice, and tobacco. The allotments quickly became assets in their own right. As allotments grew in value, landowners bought and sold them like commodities. Of course, the largest landowners held the largest allotments and reaped the most benefits from the allotment system. In the s and s, the successors to AAA, the Production and Marketing Administration and the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committees, repeatedly cut allotments in attempts to reduce the farm surplus. Local committees dominated by powerful, large landowners determined the allotments. Small farmers often justly complained that their allotments were disproportionately cut in an effort to run them out of business. The process usually left small landowners with allotments much too small to be profitable. Many responded by selling their farms and their remaining . Dovie Lee and Etta Lillian Hardy Carroll, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, Waxahachie, Tex., seven occasions from September , , to July , , IOH. . Wright, Old South, New South, ; McIntyre, interview by Doris Ashley, Franklin Parish, La., May , , EHOHP.

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allotments to large landowners who could afford to offset allotment cuts by using more fertilizer, pesticides, and technology to increase their per-acre yields. During the interwar years, most of the displaced had been tenants, but in midcentury small landowners abandoned the countryside in droves. Mrs. J. O. Lawson of Covington, Georgia, explained to one USDA official that her husband had taken a “public job” and they had left the farm in . “We have nothing left after twenty eight years of married life and working hard to raise eight children the right American descent [sic] way to live,” she said in her letter. “Why do big men like you sit around and study up something to hurt a poor mule farmer?” The Lawsons were not alone. During the s, , African American and , white landowners left farming. A new capital-intensive form of agriculture had replaced the old laborintensive system.

Southern Women and Agricultural Transformation The transformation of southern agriculture into the capital-intensive “industrial agriculture” profoundly altered the roles of women on the farm. Women found their roles in farm production and in the community’s mutual aid networks transformed. Mutual aid networks were no longer crucial to survival as families began to purchase the goods and services once exchanged by neighbors and relatives. As a result, farm women’s efforts to maintain these networks were discounted as mere socializing. Women’s work changed as well. Some women became partners in the farm operation. For example, Mabel Love of Loudon County, Tennessee, worked with her husband to transform the small general farm that they inherited from his parents into a large commercial dairy operation. “We just kept on buying a little bit more land,” she explained. “The first one I guess that we bought was that area right up where you go around the curve up there. . . . And we bought that and paid on it a while and then decided to try to buy some more. . . . Then after we got that paid for, which was quite a job to get that done, then we bought where that field is right over there on top of the hill.” Love’s use of the pronoun we to refer to decisions about land purchases and other farming changes suggests that she saw herself as a full partner in the farm operation. Another farm partner was Kline Cash’s mother who kept the books for the family’s commercial peach-farming operation near Chesnee, South Carolina. Annie . Lawson quoted in Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), .

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Maud Knittel Avis and her husband entered farming after his stint in the military. In , while he was still stationed in Hawaii, Annie negotiated the purchase of a farm outside Burton, Texas. “He hadn’t even seen it,” she noted. After his discharge in the s, the couple returned to the farm and raised beef cattle. Like many southern farmers in the second half of the century, they supplemented their agricultural income with a business venture. Avis, a trained nurse, ran a nursing home for ten years. A few women farmed on their own. Ruth Hatchette McBrayer took over her family’s peach farm after her husband’s death in . The farm “was just dumped on me,” she explained. “I didn’t know what to do really, but fortunately I learned.” She quickly discovered that her husband had died heavily in debt, so she set out to pay off the bills. Once that was done, she thought, “If I can make that much money, I’ll make some for myself.” She soon became intensely interested in the business of peach farming. She joined the South Carolina Peach Growers Association and took every Agricultural Extension Service short course that she could work into her schedule. At first, her male neighbors doubted her ability to make a go of farming on her own, but eventually, “when the men in the community saw that I had the determination and the courage and the ability, instead of conniving against me, they began to try to help me.” Eager to adopt new technology, she installed the first orchard-irrigation system in Cherokee County. A profitable grower, McBrayer farmed until her retirement in . Not all women were interested in becoming full partners in commercial farm operations. Some women withdrew from field work entirely and took on the role of middle-class homemaker. For example, Virginia McIntyre decided her role was to keep house and to care for husband and family. “I felt like I had to be home to take care of him,” she explained. “I felt like he was my first responsibility, and I still do. Some women could hop up and leave ’em, but not mine. He didn’t exactly demand it, but he kind of expected me to be there and provide for him. And I felt like if he was the breadwinner, the least I could do was to be the homemaker.” Many farm women entered the paid workforce during and after World War II. Women’s off-farm jobs subsidized the farming operation and often . Love [pseud.], interview by Melissa Walker, Loudon, Tenn., July , , MHC; Cash, interview by Melissa Walker, Chesnee, S.C., October , , notes in author’s possession; Avis, interview by Anne Radford Phillips, Burton, Tex., November , December , , TC. . McBrayer, interview by Melissa Walker, Chesnee, S.C., August , , tapes and notes in author’s possession. . McIntyre, interview.

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enabled families to maintain something resembling a middle-class lifestyle as husbands struggled to survive the unpredictable agricultural economy. Agnes Massirer, the German American wife of a central-Texas cotton farmer, explained that she often worked in the fields alongside her husband until the s when mechanical combines and cotton pickers arrived. At that point, she left field work to her husband. After her youngest child was in school, she took a job at a nearby hospital. “There was a lot of things I wanted in the house and my husband wasn’t able to buy it because we just didn’t make that much,” she told an interviewer. “That was the only way I was going to get it—if I went to work.” She worked at the hospital for twenty-seven years. Peggy Delozier Jones, a white Loudon County, Tennessee, farmwife with a degree in home economics, supervised the Works Progress Administration school-lunch program in her county and then worked for the local welfare department. She saw her work outside the home as a way to provide college educations for her sons. Mary Evelyn Lane of Blount County, Tennessee, returned to teaching school when the wartime emergency forced county officials to lift the ban on hiring married teachers. She continued to teach while her husband farmed. White Alabaman Mildred Farrow and her husband purchased a farm when he returned home from military service, but “then it got where you couldn’t make a living at it, so we went to mill work.” Textile mill jobs provided the couple with a steady income and allowed them to hold on to their land if not to farm full-time. Farrow noted that the shift to modern capital-intensive methods of farming helped push her and other women that she knew into the workforce. She noted, [M]ost women around us was working back then. . . . That was some extra income for the family. The husband just stayed on the farm and kept working and the wives worked at public works to gather up extra money. You hate to go away and leave your kids. But still, you wanted to educate them, and they had to have clothes, they had to have other things that you could not buy when you was just depending on farming, because by the time you bought your seed, fertilizer, poison [pesticides], and all the equipment and everything that always tore up, . . . you didn’t have any money left.

For southern women who remained on the land, usually the wives of white landowners, life often grew more comfortable and more prosperous by the . Massirer, interview by Lois E. Myers, Crawford, Tex., April , , IOH; Jones [pseud.], interview by Melissa Walker, Philadelphia, Tenn., July , , MHC; Lane, interview by Melissa Walker, Maryville, Tenn., August , , MHC; Farrow, interview by Pamela Grundy, Cragford, Ala., July , , Pamela Grundy Oral Histories, Auburn University Archives and Special Collections, Auburn, Ala.

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s. Not only did new technology change the nature of farming, but it also eased the housekeeping burdens of farm women. Texan Etta Carroll said, “I thought we were flying when we got an electric refrigerator.” Tennessean Kate Simmons explained that after the family obtained electricity, “the first thing I bought was a stove, which I loved. I was ready to give up on that messy wood stove.” In the s and ’s, daily life on the southern farm became less onerous for most, and rural southern women felt more a part of the American mainstream.

The Late Twentieth Century: Boom and Bust Changes in U.S. monetary policy and increased demand for American farm products on the world market caused a new agricultural boom in the s. Responding much as they had during World War I, farmers bought new land and equipment and improved their lifestyles. As always, agricultural prosperity proved short-lived. In , the boom began to slip away. Increased production resulted in lower commodity prices. Foreign nations recovered from the droughts and other natural disasters that had increased demand for American products. In an attempt to curb the rampant inflation of the s, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, which of course increased farmers’ costs for operating capital. President Jimmy Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with a grain embargo that hit American farmers particularly hard. Small southern farmers were hit hard by the new agricultural downturn. By the s, in parts of the rural South, up to  percent of families lived below the poverty line. As historian Jacqueline Jones puts it, “old forms of dependency took on new shapes.” In many places, only a fraction of poor households received Aid to Families with Dependent Children or food stamp aid. For example, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, only one-third of poor families received aid in . Like their urban counterparts, poor rural families were often female-headed. Poor rural southern women engaged in ageold coping strategies. They pieced together temporary wage jobs and grew gardens. And again, rural southerners responded to the agricultural crisis by leaving the land. At century’s end, most southern farmers struggled to stay in business in . Lee and Carroll, interview; Simmons [pseud.], interview by Melissa Walker, Loudon, Tenn., August , , MHC. . Jones, Dispossessed, chap. , esp. –.

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the face of continued overproduction, steadily falling commodity prices, and cuts in federal agricultural subsidies. African American farmers fought a new battle against discrimination. In , a group of black farmers filed a classaction suit against the USDA. They charged that the department had been guilty of racial discrimination in unnecessarily delaying the processing of black farmers’ loan applications and holding them to higher financial standards than white farmers. They also accused the department of failing to investigate hundreds of complaints lodged against it between  and . By the time the case was settled in , at an anticipated cost of $ billion, more than twenty-six thousand black farmers had joined the lawsuit, but many told reporters that the settlement was “too little, too late” to keep them in business. The women who were partners in these late-century farming operations found themselves increasingly marginalized. Often, women’s off-farm jobs paid both family and farm bills, but scholars, reporters, and governmental officials rarely recognized the importance of their incomes. In spite of all the news coverage of the plight of African American farmers as a result of their lawsuit against the USDA, the wives who shared the burden of keeping these farms going were rarely mentioned by reporters and were never referred to as “farmers.” The commercialization of agriculture had made farm women increasingly invisible. Reverse migration marked retirement for some southerners who left the rural South for jobs in the Midwest or the West. Many had always planned to return “home” when they retired with a comfortable pension; others made the decision to return later in life. Historian Chad Berry has noted that a connectedness to place and kinship ties tipped the scales in favor of returning to the rural South when white migrants retired from their industrial jobs. For example, Pauline Mayberry moved back to Tennessee from Detroit in . Her main reason for the move was to be near her ailing mother. After years of living and working in Indiana, Ed and Opal Martin returned to Cypress Inn, Tennessee, to be near Opal’s widowed mother. Black migrants who frequently return to the South upon retirement find life in the modern . “Black Farmers Sue USDA Charging Bias,” Jet (September , ): ; Roger Thurow, “Black Farmers Hit the Road to Confront a ‘Cycle of Racism,’” Wall Street Journal, May , , p. ; Johnathan Burns, “Black Farmers, USDA Near Settlement,” Macon Telegraph, December , ; Armando Villafranca, “Too Little, Too Late: Black Farmers’ Discrimination Settlement May Not Ease Years of Pain,” Houston Chronicle, December , , A; Michael Fletcher, “Black Farmers’ Awards May Top $ Billion,” Washington Post, October , .

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South more hospitable than the segregated world of their youth. A few of these migrants engage in small-scale farming, but most simply reside in the rural communities that form their roots.

The Future for Rural Southern Women Today, much of the South remains rural, and the rural nonfarm population in the former Confederate states ranges from . percent in Florida to . percent in Mississippi. Clearly, significant numbers of southern women continue to live in the countryside, though fewer make their living from the land. Material life certainly improved for rural southern women by the end of the twentieth century. They reveled in better schools that offered more opportunities for their children. One Mississippi woman noted that even class barriers had seemed to come down with modernization: “In this day in time, you have a chance to be somebody if you want. In olden times, when a family was poor, it seemed that they stayed poor. If they were middle class, they stayed middle class. And there were some that thought they were so much better than others, you know. And they kept that prestige among themselves. . . . If you want to be somebody [now] you can.” Increased access to public education, especially higher education, helped to improve economic mobility for young rural southerners. Unfortunately, the South’s rural school systems continue to lag behind. Public-education funding formulas disadvantage school districts in poor and rural counties, and rural schools are often clearly inferior to those in growing and affluent urban areas. Lack of adequate high school preparation and poverty limit access to higher education. Young rural women will continue to struggle to gain the education and skills to succeed in the new economy—on or off the land. For those who remain on the land, rural life has also become much more complicated. In the South’s growing economic centers such as Charlotte, Atlanta, and Dallas, urban sprawl consumes thousands more acres of farmland each year and inflates prices for remaining cropland. Agricultural production . Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), –. . Population figures compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, , . . Ruth Irwin, interview by Mrs. E. R. McKnight, n.p., April , EHOHP.

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costs continue to escalate, while commodity prices continue to decline. Farmers depending on federal programs to subsidize their farming are subject to complex federal regulations. Ruth Irwin of Mississippi lamented: We don’t have little farmers anymore. That is, you’ve got to have commercial farmers now ‘cause no more in Warren County can people farm unless they do it commercially. You can’t sell your sausage if you make it at home. You can’t sell your hogs except through cooperation with others. You can’t sell your beef. Everything’s different; the program’s different, and you’ve got to have cooperative inspection for everything you do. And that has done away with the little farmer.

Some family farms persist, as farmers adapt to a changing world. They depend more on new information technologies. They also engage in diverse entrepreneurial ventures: producing organic and specialty crops for restaurants and gourmet food stores, entering into arrangements with local consumers who buy a share of the farm’s harvest each year, or contracting with large agribusiness corporations to produce poultry or crops. Many have converted their farms into educational and entertainment complexes. For example, Christmas tree farmers may provide customers with hayrides and hot chocolate. Crop farmers sometimes mow mazes into cornfields to provide fall entertainment to suburbanites and town dwellers who have rarely visited a working farm. The vineyards and wineries that have sprung up all over the South provide tours and tastings. All of these new ventures appeal to an increasingly affluent urban population, eliminate middlemen, and allow farmers to reap higher profits by selling directly to consumers. Such innovations have enabled many southerners to continue farming, and, like traditional farming, these ventures often require the labor and skills of the entire family. Women often become the financial managers or the creative forces behind novel farm undertakings. Yet, most southern women who live in the countryside are no longer engaged in farming. Rural women who are not farmers find more opportunities than their foremothers, but still fewer opportunities than their urban sisters or their counterparts in other regions. Although distance continues to . Ibid. . For more on southern farmers who have adopted innovative crops or marketing strategies, see “An Olive Grove in Texas,” Economist (February , ): A; “Turkeys Are Taking Over Midlands Farms,” Columbia State, November , , B; Cheryl Long, “Forging Family-to-Farmer Connections,” Organic Gardening (May ): ; Virginia Shepherd, “Down on This Farm the Times They Are a-Changin’,” Smithsonian (July ): .

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limit job opportunities, an increasing number of good jobs exist within commuting distance of rural areas, and new technologies enable many women to telecommute. Now more women can enjoy a rural lifestyle without giving up the career opportunities they might have had to move to cities to find ten years ago. Older rural women often lament the loss of a simpler way of life. In a more densely populated countryside, city problems sometimes come to rural areas. Texan Ruth Irwin noted, “You know, it seemed to me we didn’t have as many problems then. We wadn’t [sic] so thickly populated in the country, and as the population grew thicker, the problems grew more.” Other women bemoan a younger generation that fails to value hard work and seems spoiled by an overabundance of material goods. Most of all, women seem to regret the loss of a particular way of life. Perhaps Leota Kuykendall of Texas summed it up best to an interviewer: Farm life of later years became like a factory in town really. It was a totally different kind of farm life. I believe, personally, that the farm life of my childhood had more potential for a lot more personal fulfillment than the farm life of the later years. . . . The variety of work was tremendous, which I believe creates a lot of potential for a lot of personal fulfillment in the work. . . . Whereas, in later years modern mechanization took that in a whole different direction, which I think created quantity and . . . less opportunity for that real personal fulfillment. And for the woman on the farm, it would be the same way, because in the early farm days there was all this . . . diversity in the home. . . . And the focus was not on a pretty house and a clean house and all the things that we talk about today. . . . So methods were . . . perhaps harder and less convenient, but there was a lot of opportunity for a lot more fulfillment. And I hear this particularly when I talk to my aunt because . . . she talks about her mother and her family with . . . [a] view of the creativity and how to have a little extra income. . . . When I would go home to visit my parents in the last days before they retired, these huge, huge chicken houses with thousands of chickens. . . . This work was an entirely different kind of work than the farm of my childhood. So it changed the whole . . . character of farming and life on the farm. . . . And farms today have beautiful homes and women may not work on the farms that much. They may be a housewife more like the city wives. . Irwin, interview. . Kuykendall, interview.

s Other Southern Women and the Voices of the Fathers   -      .. 

nne oodwyn ones The mutual history of black and white women in this country is a realm so painful, resonant, and forbidden that it has barely been touched by writers. — , On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 Although the direct personal experience of “difference” may be separation and disconnection, the differences that divide us are also social relationships from which no one escapes. —  , Neither Separate nor Equal: Women, Race, and Class in the South All other women in the region too often are seen merely as members of some residual categories of difference, not part of the main story. —  , Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader

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t the turn of the millennium, we are more aware than ever that whatever southern women have in common, their social and cultural roots differ vastly and offer a fascinating range of stories. In large part this is because, in Christie Anne Farnham’s words, “Today’s scholarship seeks to uncover a more inclusive history by examining southern women in all of their rich diversity 

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and moving beyond a biracial focus on the region’s past.” Over time, southern African American women’s cultures—stemming initially from a variety of African cultures and societies—have included Zora Neale Hurston’s “bluegums” and Chesnutt’s “blue veins,” the octoroons of New Orleans and the mulattas of Caribbean descent, Sea Island Gullah women filmed so beautifully in Julie Dash’s film Daughters in the Dust and “Affrilachian” mountain women. Southern white women’s cultures have ranged from the elite of Charleston’s St. Cecelia Society or Richmond’s Monument Avenue or Atlanta’s Buckhead to the “white trash” of Dorothy Allison’s North Carolina and the cracker women of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Florida; from the mountain women of Lee Smith, Olive Tilford Dargan, Harriette Arnow, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts to the Piedmont of Doris Betts and the coastal white women of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Josephine Humphries; from the urban chic of Frances Newman’s s Atlantans to the rural gentry of Ellen Glasgow. And it is clearer now than ever, too, as Farnham suggests, that the traditional assumption of a binary racial and ethnic division between white and black in the South does not describe, and has never described, the racial and ethnic diversities of southern women’s cultures. Native Americans, not “whites” or “blacks,” were of course the first women’s cultures and societies from Virginia to Florida, from Cherokee to Seminole. And the first European settlers in the South were not Anglo but Spanish. From the earliest women writing in St. Augustine to Cuban Americans today, especially in southern Florida, Hispanic women’s cultures have deeply informed the South. Haitian, Jamaican, and other Caribbean cultures, together with East Indians memorialized in a movie like Mississippi Masala, increasingly shape southern experience. Nor has the South been, as we tend to assume, uniformly Protestant— Episcopalian and Methodist and Baptist and evangelical. Southern Jewish women supported the Confederacy, and southern Catholic women shaped the lives of writers like Kate Chopin, Grace King, and Katherine Anne Porter. The assumption of a uniform sexuality for southern women, like the assumption of a uniform religion, now seems clearly wrong. Southern women’s sexualities, as they appear in the literature, seem to range across what Adrienne Rich calls a “continuum” rather than two poles with nothing between. If lesbian romance novels such as those marketed by Naiad Press in Tallahassee offer one pole, locating and located in specifically lesbian women’s cultures, . Farnham, ed., Women of the American South (New York: New York University Press, ), ix.

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and the heterosexual romances epitomized perhaps by Gone with the Wind offer another pole, implicitly defining and located within what we might call heterosexual culture, between these poles we can find romance stories by southern women that cross the boundaries not only of binary sexuality, but also of age, race, kinship, gender, and even death. Southern women’s stories of sexuality are not always about romance, of course. They are also stories of hatred and violence, of suffering and inflicting pain. There is no neat way to characterize or categorize the sexualities of southern women, and the sexual cultures they inhabit cut across and sometimes even contradict a given writer’s ethnic or class or racial or religious culture. This is only a taste of any sort of comprehensive list of southern women’s cultures, past and present. When we set the fact of this cultural diversity on one side, and on the other the continuing myth that describes the South even in the twenty-first century as dichotomously black and white, gentility and trash, gentlemen and ladies, we are faced with an oxymoron. How can both of these facts have persisted over time—cultural diversity and a cultural belief in a biracial South? To answer this question, we can begin by recalling that the American South has been defined by boundaries, by dividing lines. Political lines like the Mason-Dixon line and the borders of the Confederacy, temporarily effective, remain in memory because of more persistent cultural lines, like those John Shelton Reed has mapped out: the boundaries of Kappa Alpha fraternity, or the border where businesses in the yellow pages no longer call themselves the “Dixie Biscuit,” or the edge of Southern Baptistry. Geographical boundaries—mountains and Piedmont, black bottomland and red clay, seas, rivers, “cricks,” the dogwood and azalea zones—have set limits to its historical possibilities. But social boundaries have had far more searing effects, segregating “white” from “black,” First Families of Virginia (FFV) from “trailer trash,” English language from Spanish. The boundary between man and woman, some say, is nowhere clearer than in the South, where crossdressing can be more deadly than racial passing. Layered though they are, one upon another, a palimpsest of lines, the borders that define the South as a cultural region thus find a match in those within the region’s historical boundaries, some of them tangible, some not. Racial borders constructed to buttress a threatened economy and sustained to preserve white power took material shape in separate water fountains and the etiquette of street walking and hat doffing; despite desegregation and the . See Reed, “The South: What Is It? Where Is It?” in My Tears Spoiled My Aim, and Other Reflections on Southern Culture (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, ), –.

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success of black style, churches and neighborhoods still today preserve racial lines. Class borders historically signified by the FFV and the St. Cecelia Society in Charleston remain in force: zoning and gated communities now separate “trailer trash” from the elite; skin color and sport of choice still “class off” social groups. Arguably, the gender constructions in the South—whatever their successes over time—have been among the most rigid in the nation, complicit as they were with the energy and desire behind fictions of race and class distinction. Femininity seems more feminine, and masculinity more masculine, where the southern belle lives on in postmodern plantations and the last real men are, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, men in full. All these boundaries and borders have defined an ideologically white South, a South that still wants to fly the Confederate flag. They have defined a mythically male South as well, where the southern white lady and belle serve as icon and ideal but preserve male privilege. And they have defined a South of privilege and power: the South of the class that has been able to draw the lines. Yet because they are borders drawn by desire, by ideology and myth, these borders remain at some level a fantasy imposed on actual diversity. Scholars have argued for some time now that social borders need to be understood as cultural fictions (at least compared to the tangible boundaries formed by mountains and rivers), however tangible their effects. More recently, the argument has been extended: an obsessive need to construct, to enforce, to patrol borders can be read as a symptom of their very fragility— of the enforcers’ fear that the borders might all too easily be lost or breached. But what evokes this fear? Plausible theories range widely. German literary critic Klaus Theweleit, who studied the private writings of proto-Nazis, found therein the male fear of engulfment and loss of self, and the reactive erection (so to speak) of deep boundaries as a kind of “body armor.” Theorist Nancy Jay compares two logics used in religious anthropology, and shows how an “x vs. not-x” logic—depending on and creating the fear of secularization—requires (yet always produces the destruction of ) more rigid borders than an “A, B, C, and D” logic. Anthropologist Mary Douglas’s examination of the cultural functions of “purity and danger” lingers on cultural needs for clear borders to create purity. Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir sees boundaries as consequent to an act characteristic of humans across time: creating an “other” whose difference can then support the sameness of the “one.” Feminist psychoanalytic critic Nancy Chodorow’s analysis of the differences between boys’ and girls’ relations to their parents argues that women think in threes and men in binaries. In these and other cases, the analysis of . Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ).

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boundaries most generally reveals an awareness (and a fear) of the diversity and fluidity perceived as actually present and everywhere pervasive. Borders, in brief, offer a sense of control over reality, blockading threatening material from the self, the cohort, the community, the race, the class, the nation, the gender. A mental construct, a fiction, boundaries nevertheless organize and offer control over a more complicated actuality. Southern women, like other “others” constructed by others’ borders, have had a problematic relation to most of the dominant cultural fictions in the South. Privileged by certain of these cultural divisions and punished by others, white elite women and “white trash,” black middle-class and poor black women, second- and third-generation daughters of Cuba all share cultural identity as females whose bodies alone, as numerous recent scholars point out, inevitably become the sites of border transgressions, disputes, and treaties. French feminist theorists in particular have seen the female body as a bordered (w)hole always deconstituting and reconstituting itself; or as always already divided, split, cut; or as biologically determined to be territory to be invaded, colonized, and claimed as property within someone else’s legal and social borders. Psychoanalytic and psychological studies like Chodorow’s have suggested that, for better and for worse, women have less investment in clear identity borders than do men. Certain literary theorists argue further that— for good or ill—women’s texts show as texts the marks of their engagement with the discourse of borders: in women’s writings, epistemological borders between fact and fiction, or disciplinary borders between history and religion, or generic (genre) borders between, say, poem and novel, or formal borders, defining a literary form, or linguistic borders, establishing a discursive limit, will likely be questioned in texts by women. As we have seen, no one could claim today that the South is in fact a binary land. Disputes over flag flying, linguistic conflicts about black English and Spanish, migrations of African Americans and Jewish retirees from the North, and immigrations from the Caribbean and Latin America, India, and Lebanon have made the region a polysemy. How can we read it now? Should we simply throw out as useless the idea of region and the term the South? Much of the work in “southern studies” today takes a different path: reflecting on and

. See Theweleit, Male Fantasies,  vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); Jay, “Gender and Dichotomy,” Feminist Studies : (spring ): –; Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (; reprint, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ); de Beauvoir, introduction to The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ); Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ).

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redefining the region. The result has been the emergence of a “South”—that is, a concept or representation of the South—that is culturally diverse and that challenges cultural studies in history, literature, and other disciplines to look at the past in this way. The same has been true for women’s studies in the South: the listserv H-SAWH shows sea changes in objects of study and topics of interest. And when members of more cultures are employed in the academy—when more blacks, Chicanas, and Latinas are hired—the intellectual terrain expands and the canon shifts and grows. Given all this evidence not only of contemporary diversity and complexity, but also of a history of multiple rather than binary differences, how can we explain the persistence of the popular belief in a South of plantations and cabins, ladies and sluts, whites and blacks, that is, in a monolithic, dichotomously divided South? Who is invested in maintaining the old fantasy? The case of southern literature by women provides a partial and suggestive answer to the question. I will argue that objective and public as well as subjective and interior struggles between the voices of women writers and the “voices of the fathers” long before and during the twentieth century kept the public awareness of diversity at bay, sustaining the fictions of absolute difference. The terms and territories of those struggles shifted and differed over time; what seems now like diversity in literary production in the early part of the twentieth century disappeared, for example, with the invention of what was called the new (literary) criticism. What we can now see, however, by looking at a history of “southern literature,” examining “lost” women’s texts, and rereading canonical southern women’s writings are the marks of those struggles throughout the century and the gradual emergence of a publicly polyvocal “South.”

The Anthologies, the Fathers, and the Canon When women’s studies began to look beyond its initial regional limits of New England, the first group of southern women to evoke interest was— ironically but predictably—white elite women, a group defined and placed front and center by the boundaries southern dichotomies had created. Privileged yet disempowered, these women, like the scholars in a position to study them, were educated and literate. They left records: they wrote novels, letters, diaries, poetry. Their experience of oppression within and by the very agents of their privilege resembled the oppression of early women’s studies students, second-class citizens in the ivied halls of academe. My own book on white southern women writers, Tomorrow Is Another Day (), shares the hopes and the blindnesses of that moment in history.

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Southern women writers, like southern women and southerners more generally, have from the start emerged from a diversity of cultures: arguably, the first southern woman to produce texts was a Native American. More particularly, though it was less evident when Rich wrote “Disloyal to Civilization” because of the limitations of what was then the canon, southern women from diverse cultures have written consistently over time about the diversity in the South, not only representing their own cultures but also focusing repeatedly in their stories and poems, memoirs and letters, plays and essays on the lives of what they saw as “other” southern women. Fascinated by the boundaries that separated them, educated by the experiences that brought them together, southern women writers challenged, revised, circumvented, and reinvented the borders that dominant southern ideology so blatantly imposed. Yet a student of southern literature in the middle of the twentieth century would not have suspected these facts to be true. Southern literature, first, would have been understand to be white. The South, after all, had been invented in the early nineteenth century to serve white economic and eventually nationalist desires. The (white) Confederacy and the South were virtually coterminous: rebel and southron were interchangeable terms during the Civil War. The Old South was to be constructed and mourned by whites as the Lost Cause after the war. Into the early twentieth century, the “birth of a nation” uniting South and North was made possible under the aegis of whiteness, an “Aryan nation.” Southern modernist thinkers and writers into the s sought to resist modernization and preserve an agrarian life, premised on white traditions and dominance. These are the very men who presided over the birth of a national literary theory, the new criticism, as well as a canon of southern literature that would remain unquestioned for decades in midcentury. Although some southern women obviously identified with this elite, white, and male South, it is now clear not only that this definition of the South excluded many other southern women, but also that it was designed by and meant to serve certain men and a certain masculinity as well as pale people and whiteness. Southern literature at midcentury was, in a word, understood to be male as well as white. But what about Flannery O’Connor? Eudora Welty? Caroline Gordon? Major figures at midcentury, these women were certainly part of southern literary anthologies, courses, and histories at the time, making the southern canon more gender inclusive than even the Amer. D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (),  min. (New York: Kino Video, ), videorecording.

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ican canon. Yet a more nuanced understanding of the “maleness” of southern literature will clarify this apparent contradiction. As Michael Kreyling and others have shown, these women writers were included precisely because some of their work could be selected for and described in the diminutive terms for womanhood that suited southern manhood: “[W]hatever the merits of their work,” in Richard H. King’s now infamous words, “[women writers] were not concerned primarily with the larger cultural, racial, and political themes that I take as my focus.” Predictably, too, the women’s texts chosen for teaching, as measured by anthology choices, did not include troubling, difficult, or problematic narratives of the sort that Patricia Yaeger explores in Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990, and the women’s texts that did surface into the canon were not read resistingly, looking for trouble. Throughout much of the twentieth century, southern literature would have been understood by what today seems a narrow definition. Only texts that fit the genres and standards implanted by modernism and the new criticism could be called “literature.” Slave narratives, diaries and letters, material culture, popular fiction, polemics—all were subliterary or not literary at all. Yet from the very start, white and black—and “other”—southern women writers have been consistently discovering and speaking out resistingly, exposing the contradictions between a reality of diversity and a myth of sameness, in southern literature as well as in the “South.” Thus, to tell a story of southern women’s writings that begins with white women and only later expands to include other southern women, or that ignores the stories by canonized and excluded women that explore difference and diversity in the South, is to miss this truth. And it is to mistake the borders set by the canon of southern literature (even now, as it is currently being revised) for the reality of southern women’s writings over the century. Examining the tables of contents of a succession of anthologies of southern literature is a quick way to get a sense of the story not of women’s writings themselves but of the process of canonization that, by selective inclusion, has given us a mistaken sense of who southern women writers were, and a misshapen sense of the subjects these southern women cared, thought, and wrote about. Michael Kreyling has carefully studied the major popular anthologies, such as The Library of Southern Literature; Randall Stewart, Richard Croom Beatty, Floyd C. Watkins, and Thomas Daniel Young’s Literature of . King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, –  (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ; Yaeger, Dirt and Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).

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the South; Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin Jr.’s Southern Writing, 1585–1920; and Rubin’s Literary South—those that represented, in a word, the dominant ideology of which I am speaking. It should be noted that all of the editors named, eminent southernists, were white, and all of them were men. The same description fits the editors of two other anthologies produced early in the twentieth century, this time by southern liberals, thus anthologies that went against the grain of, for instance, the Library of Southern Literature. Edwin Mims, then chairing the Vanderbilt English Department, coedited a collection with Bruce Payne designed for “schools”: Scribner’s published Southern Prose and Poetry in . What strikes the twenty-first-century reader is the diversity of literary forms and political positions represented in Mims’s anthology: letters by Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson and orations by John Calhoun and Henry Grady share anthology space with poems by Edgar Allan Poe and Irwin Russell and stories by Thomas Nelson Page and George Washington Cable. Not only does Mims hold a generous (and premodernist) understanding of what is “literary,” but he also manages to include texts from conflicting ideological positions, juxtaposing New South (Grady) and Old South (Calhoun) voices, racial-radical (Cable) and racialreactionary (Page). Yet even in this liberal collection, not a single black writer appears in a roster of forty-five; four, or just under  percent, are women. In , two decades later, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press published another liberal collection, Stories of the South, Old and New. The intent of this collection was to represent “the South itself ” in its diversity: “My objective,” asserts Addison Hibbard in his introduction, “has precluded my representing the same situation, the same theme, the same class of people too many times. . . . Too readily these stories of the South group themselves about certain set conventions [such as] the plantation gentleman, the loyal Negro slave, the mountaineer.” Indeed, Hibbard goes on to detail the “clichés” of plot and character he hopes to see die: the superstitious, loyal, slapstickcomedy-prone black man; the suspicious, violent, proud mountaineer; and the courtly, duelling, graceful plantation master. These southerners are, of course, all male: Hibbard does not seem aware of gender, and does not address literary stereotypes of southern women at all. Yet of his twenty-seven . See the extended analysis in “Southern Literature Anthologies and the Invention of the South,” in Inventing Southern Literature, ed. Michael Kreyling (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –. . Mims and Payne, Southern Prose and Poetry for Schools (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ).

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stories, a little more than one-quarter (seven) are by women. That is a surprisingly high percentage. And although all the women writers are white, Hibbard includes three black men (Paul Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, and Benjamin Brawley) and chooses texts by women that actually deal with race and gender issues. Grace King’s “Drama of Three,” for instance, with its portrait of a self-obsessed general through the eyes of his wife, immolated on his “pyre” but still erotically entranced, is a mild precursor to Flannery O’Connor’s wicked “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” Hibbard concludes his introduction by calling the reader’s attention to Ellen Glasgow’s writing of a farm, not a plantation; Frances Newman satirizing the Atlanta upper crust; and a host of white southerners writing out a “different Negro” from the loyal darky, among them T. S. Stribling, Julia Peterkin, Dubose Heyward, and Howard Odum. However inclusive of diverse writings and writers Mims and Hibbard may have been in  and , few of the writers they included appeared in the anthologies published after midcentury, when literary study across the English-speaking world and certainly across the United States had shifted focus to a modernist agenda. Guided in part by southern-born literary theorists and “new critics” John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Caroline Gordon and by a reverence for modernism’s purities, teachers, professors, critics, and students turned away from context to look at the text with more care. Works that withstood this gaze tended to be subtle, complex, even difficult, requiring time, patience, and universitytrained analytical skills. They also tended to emerge from Vanderbilt Agrarian conservatism; the new critics, after all, wrote poetry and fiction as well as literary theory. The Chapel Hill emphasis on cultural diversity represented in Hibbard’s UNC Press anthology, and the pre-Fugitive emphasis on textual diversity at Mims’s Vanderbilt, had lost favor by midcentury, and the anthologies Kreyling discusses show exactly how. The modernist women chosen for Louis D. Rubin Jr.’s Literary South, for example, are Ellen Glasgow, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, and Eudora Welty, all of them connected with the Vanderbilt Agrarians. Frances Newman and Julia Peterkin do not appear, and still there are no African American southern women writers. Just as crucially, the texts chosen by Rubin to represent the women he did include are—in comparison to the bulk of their writings—socially and politically innocuous. Porter’s “Grave,” Gordon’s “Last Day in the Field,” and Welty’s “Why I Live at the P. O.” tell private family stories that touch on neither race questions nor cultural diversity. . Hibbard, ed., Stories of the South, x.

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Indeed, Gordon’s story is told from the point of view of a southern gentleman, and it is hard to read resistance to the dominant southern ideology even between the lines. Similarly, Welty’s famous story can be read as a satire, albeit gentle, on a female type from a lower class, and Porter’s as a model of the avoidance modernist symbolism and universal themes could permit. The end of the twentieth century saw major as well as not-so-major publishers marketing a spate of southern anthologies, among them Edward Ayers and Bradley Mittendorf ’s Oxford Book of the American South; Norton’s Literature of the American South edited by William Andrews, Minrose Gwin, Trudier Harris, and Fred Hobson; and Edward Francisco, Robert Vaughan, and Linda Francisco’s South in Perspective. Meridian also published an anthology of southern African American writing, John Oliver Killens and Jerry Ward’s Black Southern Voices, and Mary Louise Weaks and Carolyn Perry edited an anthology of southern women writers, Southern Women’s Writing, published by the University of Florida Press. Times have changed, so it seems: Eighteen of Ayers’s  entries are by women, or  percent, and one-third of those are black women. Twenty-eight of Andrews’s  entries are by women, or  percent; just over one-third are black. Forty-one of Francisco’s  entries are by women, or  percent, and of them , or  percent, are black (blacks fare less well generally in Francisco, constituting only  of  entries, or just under  percent; on the other hand, the editors imaginatively placed newly discovered and diverse voices in “close proximity” to one another). Twenty of Killens and Ward’s  African American southern writers are women, or  percent, and  of Weaks and Perry’s  female southern writers are African American, or  percent. As for the specific writers chosen, and the texts chosen to represent them, the choices loosely (and perhaps obviously) reflect the stated interest of each anthology and anthologizer: women’s issues in Southern Women Writers, black issues in Black Southern Voices, literary issues in The Literature of the American South, subregional issues in The South in Perspective, and historical issues in The Oxford Book of the American South. . Rubin, The Literary South (New York: John Wiley and Sons, ). . Ayers and Mittendorf, The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Andrews et al., The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, ); Francisco, Vaughan, and Francisco, The South in Perspective: An Anthology of Southern Literature (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, ); Killens and Ward, Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays (New York: Meridian, ); Weaks and Perry, Southern Women’s Writing: Colonial to Contemporary (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ). Quotation is from Francisco, Vaughan, and Francisco, South in Perspective, xxvi.

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To what can we attribute this millennial shift? Certainly, a major factor has been the end of the dominance of the new criticism over literary critical practice, and the emergence since the s not only of a broader understanding of “text” but also of a strong commitment to social justice and an equally strong interest in history among southern literary scholars in general. As English departments have become more culturally diverse, people who are most likely to ask questions and intuit patterns related to cultural diversity have been paid to do so. It is telling that of the thirteen editors of the late-century anthologies, three are black and five are women. (Trudier Harris alone does double statistical service.) Most of the credit, first, needs to go to the specific labors of dozens of scholars who have sought out and brought out lost or ignored texts by southern women, fleshing out with specific texts their intuition that women would have written against the grain of the southern literary canon. Second, the critical labor of interpreting those newly discovered texts, and reinterpreting canonized writers and texts, has been central to the growing awareness of the complexity and diversity of southern texts and especially of texts by southern women.

Moving Outside the Canon: New Texts, New Readings In this section, I will present a few samples of textual recovery and offer some efforts at reinterpretation of canonized southern women writers by focusing on three themes. I will later concentrate on the white writer’s troubled voice and on possible new paradigms; first, I will look at southern white women writing their sense of African American “other women,” and the reverse, southern African American women writing their sense of the white “other woman.” Immediately, we can see how the parallel falters: the white woman as “other” to black women does not carry the same meanings as the black woman’s “otherness” to white women. Simone de Beauvoir introduces the notion of the “other” into feminist thinking; she makes the point that for there to be an “other,” there must be a one, a same, a not-other by which all others are measured. For de Beauvoir, of course, that “one” is man. Yet Christie Anne Farnham points out that “popular notions of a monolithic South [see] the prototypical southern woman [as] a white ‘lady.’ All other women in the region too often are seen merely as members of some residual categories of difference, not part of the main story.” In the South, the . Farnham, Women of the American South, ix.

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white lady is the “one,” the norm, the not-other, within the gender category “woman.” So the black woman must be already in a position of subjective centrality in order to see the white woman as other, while the white woman de facto occupies the seat of centrality. Yet the white “lady” is still other to men, in particular to white “gentlemen” who wield final naming power in the region. I will offer as a model for interpretation the ways the “fathers’ voices” intervene in these efforts of white women to come to terms with black women, representing their relationships honestly. To an extent, the “fathers’ voices” intervene also in black women writers’ efforts. These samples might begin to constitute a history (and suggest an anthology) of southern women writing in the twentieth century that focuses even more intently than has already occurred on cultural diversity and on dealing with differences between women. A fuller history, and certainly an anthology, would include texts written by other “other women” that specifically address the diversity among southern women: southern Latinas, lesbians, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, Middle Easterners, workingclass women, and farm women.

Representing the Other For now, though, how do southern black and white women see one another in texts by whites? Are there points of contact and connection, like the moments in the film The Long Walk Home when Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek) and Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) are able to speak honestly across the division of mistress and maid? This little-known film tells the story of a white married club woman in Montgomery at the time of Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. Goldberg is Spacek’s maid; she reluctantly joins the boycott, making her walk home long. With a scrupulous eye for s material-culture detail, the film tells the story of two families, but charts most prominently the nuances of Spacek’s “walk” from sheltered womanhood to activist in the streets, joining forces and hands and voices with the black women who have organized car pools to shorten those long walks. This moving film links the barriers of race to the dominance of white masculinity. Miriam Thompson’s participation in the boycott—which begins only with driving Odessa to work—escalates as her husband, threatened in his white manhood by his wife’s behavior, exercises (or tries to exercise) patriarchal control. Even Odessa Cotter’s husband tells her, as Norman tells Miriam, that there is no hope for understanding and care between the races. But is Goldberg’s character’s titular and figurative “walk” obscured by her

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white mistress’s story? What are the whitening effects of Mary Steenburgen’s voice-over narration as the adult Mary Katherine Thompson, a nine year old during the film’s action? Does cross-cutting between the two families and two homes serve both women’s stories equally? A powerful recent white woman’s novel about interracial women’s relationships is Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby. This novel, playing with the familiar mistress-maid plot, tells the story of a sensitive, intelligent, educated white woman’s relationship with Tweet, her maid. The novel shows first how successfully the two women seem to carry out a cordial, even personal relationship as they work together in Cornelia’s home; by the end, the novel shows how thoroughly Cornelia has tuned out Tweet’s real voice and meanings, and how deep and old Tweet’s heretofore concealed rage has been. The novel foregrounds the limitations of its authorship by interjecting, in the voice of the author, commentary about her authorial capacity and incapacity to represent Tweet. Remarkable for its author’s—as well as Cornelia’s—selfdoubt and introspection about her power as a white, nevertheless the novel seems trapped in whiteness even when it writes across racial boundaries, telling Tweet’s story, or part of Tweet’s story, to the reader, and using African American blues as a key metaphor. An equally powerful contemporary novel by a black writer, Sherley Anne Williams, sets out with a similar project: to represent in its complexity a relationship between a black woman, a slave, and a white woman, not her mistress. Interestingly, Williams waits until she is deep into the narrative, Dessa Rose—eighty-two pages deep, in part —to introduce the white woman, Rufel, to the title character. Her image of the woman is almost horrific: “The white woman’s mouth was like an open wound across the milky paleness of her face.” And Rufel’s point of view appears for the first time ten pages later, as she speculates on the “wench” Dessa Rose, who has just given birth, and on the truths about white men that she believes everyone knows: they could never desire a “rawboned, brown-skinned woman or her lanky, half-witted daughter,” so Rufel does not “believe a word” of the stories of cruel masters. Clearly, Williams expects the reader to see the limitations of Rufel’s point of view here, but thereafter she allows the white character and the relationship between the two women to develop with great complexity. Does a black woman writer, as the more marginalized and hence more needful . The Long Walk Home,  min., Miramax Films (Van Nuys, Calif.: Live Home Video, ), videorecording. . Douglas, Can’t Quit You, Baby (New York: Penguin Books, ).

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of understanding those who have power over her, have a more solid ground on which to base writing from a white woman’s point of view than a white woman does for a black woman? How much truth can such contemporary works by white writers see and allow, and how much can black writers risk? For that matter, is this examination of truth new to the works of contemporary women, or was it present in earlier works? To look back for a moment, black and white southern women writers have taken up some of these questions since well before the century began. White writer Kate Chopin’s “La Belle Zoraïde” sets up a paradigm we have already seen in several contemporary texts: a white mistress, having been bathed by her black maid and now pillowed in bed, will hear a bedtime story. The story is excruciating: a house slave, Zoraïde, is forced to give up her child fathered by a beautiful and very black lover. She is then lied to about the condition of the child. Gaslit, she loses her sanity, clinging to the rags she thinks are her daughter and rejecting her actual child once she is finally returned. Her mistress’s plans to keep her “classed off” from darker blacks of course fail. The frame story shows the horrible irony. This mistress fails to comprehend the point. Unable to see herself in Zoraïde, she saves her identifications and sympathy only for Zoraïde’s child. The white southern woman is, in the frame story, in every sense the child, pampered and ignorant; her maid is the adult, the storyteller, and the trickster. The Minorcan child in white writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Felipa” does not yet have the skills of Chopin’s maid. To the white women who are the protagonists, Felipa represents the “other” woman in clear Victorian terms: she is between civilized and savage, white and black, human and animal, and—interestingly—lesbian and heterosexual. Though the story is told from the white artist’s point of view (her friend, the white beauty, becomes the object of desire but not the subject of narration), she makes Felipa’s struggles to comprehend and connect with these visitors from the rich white world graphic and moving. Yet what price is paid for avoiding Felipa’s point of view? How much is the story invested in the very dichotomies it explores? When Lillian Smith published Killers of the Dream in , it was considered a radical polemic against segregation. Smith bars no holds as she critiques . Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: Berkley Books, ), , , , . . Chopin, “La Belle Zoraïde,” in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), :–. . Woolson, “Felipa (),” in The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories, ed. Dorothy Abbott and Susan Koppelman (New York: Signet, ), –.

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class power; racism; the self-sustaining triangle of “sin, sex, and segregation”; and the enervation of white southern ladies. Smith’s understanding of the South parallels racial segregation, an uncrossable, external boundary line, with repression and denial, which form uncrossable, internal boundary lines. She rarely, if at all, crosses the line to enter a black woman’s point of view, saving her analysis for the ways whiteness works, as she sees it in herself. How useful is her method of analysis today? How do we understand her hostile language—she was a lesbian—toward “masculinized” women, Communists, and the like? Does racial awareness not suggest other forms of tolerance?

The White Southern Woman Writer’s Troubled Voice William Lumpkin of Georgia had three daughters to make into southerners with his storytelling about the lost antebellum South. He took his oldest and his favorite, Elizabeth, to Boston to cultivate her voice; she pursued a career in theater. Elizabeth eventually married, gave up her work in the theater, and moved to Asheville to raise children. By contrast, Grace, the second daughter, moved to New York where she lived in the East Village and began to write fiction. Her first novel, To Make My Bread, won the Maxim Gorky Award for best labor novel of . Grace became involved with the Communist Party, married and then unmarried, converted to traditional Christianity, and returned to the South to die. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was the baby. Like her sisters, she soaked up the old stories her father told her. “I knew even then,” she wrote in The Making of a Southerner, “that his name as a teller of tales was second only to his name as a devotee of the Lost Cause.” In spite of her father’s influence, by the time she was twenty, Katharine Lumpkin had become a radical on race. “Converted” by a Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) staff member who had come to speak at her college, Brenau, Lumpkin joined the YWCA as a paid professional after she graduated. There, women of both races met, spoke, and even—viscerally shocking for whites—ate together in an effort to act out their belief that all people are created equal. Lumpkin also worked in the industrial projects of the YWCA; these projects brought . Smith, Killers of the Dream, rev. ed. (; reprint, New York: Norton, ). . Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (New York: Macaulay, ). . Lumpkin, Making (; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), .

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undergraduate women together with women factory workers in an effort to remake southern assumptions about class. The five years from  to  did remake Katharine Lumpkin; she worked through the agonizing process of experiencing and relinquishing her own emotional investment in white supremacy. Lumpkin went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia and then a Ph.D. from Wisconsin in sociology. Her life took shape as a woman academic; she worked on research grants, taught at Smith and Wells Colleges, published several books, and developed courses in, among other topics, race relations. She never married. Lumpkin retired to Charlottesville, where she bought a house with sister Elizabeth. They moved to Chapel Hill’s Carol Woods retirement community in the s; there Elizabeth Bennett died. When I interviewed her, Katharine Lumpkin, at eighty-nine, lived in an apartment at Carol Woods; she was mobile, alert, and still filled with passionate intelligence. She forgot dates, names, entire periods of her life when she was asked for facts. But she remembered personalities, experiences, impressions, and feelings without flaw: in short, she remembered narrative rather than data. Ellen Glasgow described southern thinking as “evasive idealism.” Like Lillian Smith, Lumpkin saw through these evasions when their subject was race. Yet when it came to questions of gender and sexuality, she instead seems to have acted out—and inscribed in the subtext of her autobiography—a conflict about traditional southern views that characterizes many white southern women writers. This is not a new insight about Lumpkin. When The Making of a Southerner was published, Lillian Smith reviewed it in the New York Times; there she commented on Lumpkin’s omission of sex from what Smith had called, in Killers of the Dream, the “sin-sex-segregation spiral.” As Smith saw it, this web of ideology kept southern order by entangling gender with race and religion, specifically in the assumptions that white women were pure, black women sensual, and black men anxious to rape white women. But the point of view in Making of a Southerner remains stubbornly impersonal, hidden. Lumpkin claims this persona is intentional. She wanted to write not her personal story for its own sake but her story as it represented a

. Lumpkin, interviews by the author, Chapel Hill, . . Smith, Killers of the Dream, . “The Lessons,” –, is a chapter that links sin, sex, and segregation. . Smith, review of Making, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review (February , ): , excerpted in Book Review Digest: Forty-third Annual Cumulation (New York: H. W. Wilson, ), .

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common experience, the making and remaking of a southerner. Other southerners could read her book, she hoped, and make themselves into new postracist southerners. Impersonality fails her, though, when it is stretched beyond its capacities. Lumpkin locates a particular memory as providing her own “sharp awakening” to the meaning of racism. She has just described her own house and grounds: A few other houses stood on either side of us, wooden frame structures, less pretentious than ours. In one of them lived the sheriff of the county. I have no recollection of the man. Possibly I rarely saw him. Certainly at my age I grasped little of what a sheriff was, except vaguely to connect him with the jail. In any small town a child would see the jail with its barred windows and usually the face of a Negro looking out. I knew the sheriff lived down the street in a house that we children held in some awe. One summer morning I had gone aimlessly out into the yard before breakfast. In the kitchen breakfast-preparation had been stirring as I passed. Of a sudden in the house there was bedlam—sounds to make my heart pound and my hair prickle at the roots.

When Katharine sees what is happening, she describes it this way: “I could see [the cook] writhing under the blows of a descending stick wielded by the white master of the house.” Whose kitchen? Whose house? And which master? The hasty reader, absent other names, might pick up Lumpkin’s red herring and think it is the sheriff, but a careful reader will see, perhaps with horror, that it is her own father. Lumpkin seems to waver in her narrative at this point, undecided about how clearly she wants to name her father as the cruel master. At the time of the incident, Lumpkin tells us that the young Katharine tried to close out the experience by “stuffing [her] fists in [her] ears.” But she stayed there at the scene, transfixed. Now, the Katharine who narrates covers her mouth, telling yet withholding at the same time, reinscribing the conflict she felt then. The father whose presence so dominated Katharine’s experience as a child died when she was about thirteen. Immediately upon his death, she told me, “I became my own boss. I began planning my future.” But listen to the way she conveys so momentous an event in the narrative. Here in its entirety is the paragraph that describes his death: “Only three months after we reached our new home, Father, while away on a trip, was taken ill and a few days later died. For the time being we could but continue on the farm. One could not in a moment make satisfactory disposition of a place just purchased, or its supplies . Lumpkin, Making, , , .

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and equipment, or its fields, some of which were already planted. We were city-bred. None of us knew any farming. But we had no real alternative.” That’s it. No more mention. No feelings, no thoughts, no grief, nothing. In the place of that absence, there appears—judging by the narrative sequence—a small black boy named Money. In literary terms, the voice of a black boy displaces the voice of the white father. It is a move with obvious symbolic importance for Lumpkin, emblematizing as it does the direction her life would take. What makes the narrative obliteration of her father still more remarkable is the idealization of the male presence earlier in Making of a Southerner. In Lumpkin’s version of southern history, the male story is almost exclusive. Women’s stories, even her mother’s stories, occupy minimal space. One thinks by contrast of Katherine Anne Porter’s invocation of women’s stories of southern history in “Old Mortality,” or Faulkner’s in Flags in the Dust. Moreover, descriptions of antebellum plantation activities that we know now to have been the province of women are seen by Lumpkin as male activities. Even the family genealogy is described exclusively in terms of the males. It is as though the father has taken over the text. Like Miss Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! Lumpkin’s narrator idealizes or exaggerates the very patriarchal voices she later shuts out. In her life, then, and to a certain extent in the subtext of her autobiography—in her narrative style—Lumpkin located a polyphony of voices, including those of her “other southern woman,” female black voices. But when it came to the entanglement of sex—that is, gender—with sin and segregation in the South, Lumpkin could not find her own strong narrative voice. Lumpkin grew up in a culture in which the white man’s voice defined reality; the white woman’s reinforced his definitions. In her early study, The Family, Lumpkin analyzed traditional family structure among charity cases in New York City. She said in our interview that her own family, unlike those families in so many ways, shared one characteristic in common: the father’s word was law. Lumpkin said that her mother must have been “distressed” by this at times, but that she never said a word of it to anyone. The “other woman” for the southern white woman writer can take many forms, even that of a literal sister. As we saw, Lumpkin had two sisters. In our interview, Lumpkin spoke with great fondness of Elizabeth, whom she . Lumpkin, interviews; Lumpkin, Making, . . Lumpkin, Making, . . Lumpkin, The Family: A Study of Member Roles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ).

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described as gentle, kind, and tolerant. Elizabeth was her father’s favorite, and gave up a career to lead a traditional southern lady’s life. When I asked Katharine what Elizabeth thought about this book, she told me admiringly that she was sure Elizabeth disagreed deeply with a number of the ideas, but that she kept silent about it, for fear of causing pain to Katharine. Instead, she helped Katharine get it reviewed in a significant Asheville publication. Although she was quite willing to speculate about Elizabeth’s thoughts, Katharine responded to nearly all questions about her outspoken sister Grace with an intense and quite determined silence of her own. Her claim that she did not want to speak for Grace because she was dead and could not speak for herself is not convincing; Elizabeth, too, was dead. And Lumpkin’s responses to questions about that other radical southern woman, Lillian Smith, were at best cool. It appears that on some level Katharine Lumpkin retained all her life the patriarchal view of southern women, even though she refused to live out its design. As a single woman and probably a lesbian, she rejected—deliberately or not—the role of wife and mother she so admired in her own mother and sister. And she found herself thriving in an all or mostly female world: the YWCA, women’s colleges, female friendships, and female coauthorships. Her commitment to racial equality was unequivocal, brave, and forward-looking. Her life as an independent, creative woman who found her nurturance within communities of women broke the mold of the helpless southern lady. Yet in some ways, this new kind of southerner she made of herself nevertheless sustained, unawares, the very structures she rejected. She chose not to hear and not to speak on crucial and related issues of sexuality and gender; she was silent even, perhaps, to herself. Willa Cather waited until her last novel to deal explicitly with the “other” woman in her southern past, but she does so tellingly in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a novel that tells on Cather’s own white blindness as it tells the story of a molested slave. Cather’s last novel represents her most direct approach to the materials of her earliest memories and her first truths growing up as a child in Virginia. Those memories and truths emerge through other people’s stories: the novel’s main action takes place in , so the only access for Cather—who appears at the end of the novel in the first person, as a child—is mediated. Rather than Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, the slave mistress named in the title, the unnamed slave girl Nancy Till bears the burden of Cather’s own emotional narrative. Of the nine “books” in the novel, . See Jacquelyn Hall, “Open Secrets: Memory, Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity,” American Quarterly : (): –.

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five are named for slaves; only three refer to whites (the ninth is “The Dark Autumn”). Slaves’ stories, and stories of poor whites in the mountains, constitute many of the embedded narratives as well. The story of Old Jezebel, born in Africa and shipped between decks on a slave ship to be sold in America, is especially powerful. Cather’s title (and the blurbs on my Vintage paperback) proclaim the story to concern “a Virginia lady. . . who marries beneath her and becomes irrationally jealous of [the slave girl] Nancy.” This focus on a single white female character is misleading. The plot begins with Sapphira’s initial and unfounded anxiety that her husband has taken a fancy to Nancy, who cares for his quarters in the mill. The real culprit is her own nephew Martin— whom Sapphira finds, ironically, quite amusing. In terrifying predictability, Martin stalks Nancy to the point that she is ready to kill herself. At this point, Rachel Blake, the Colberts’ antislavery daughter, helps Nancy to escape to Montreal via the Underground Railroad. Twenty-five years later, in the presence of five-year-old Willa Cather, Nancy comes home from Montreal for the first time and is reunited with her aging mother, Till. Sapphira; her husband, Henry; and Martin are all dead, Martin, ironically, as a Confederate hero. One woman remarks that they were not very sorry to see him go. Rachel and Nancy reunite at the end of the novel, in a scene that suggests cross-racial solidarity among women. However, as the novel has displayed, women have differences within that can break apart a community, and those differences are not elided by the scenes of mutuality between Rachel and the Tills. Earlier in the novel, the differing interests, stakes, privileges, and loyalties of southern women had set them against one another. The hyperprivileged Sapphira, mistress (her husband even calls her “master”) of slaves and focus of constant attention, is nevertheless vulnerable, for whatever her privileges, she is aging and her body is betraying her, while Nancy is young and beautiful. Lizzie and Bluebell, slaves like Till and Nancy, set themselves up as spies and tattlers on their fellow slaves to gain favor in the slave hierarchy. Nancy’s beauty is no protection against the forced intimacies of a white man; Martin forces her to unpack his dirty underwear and walks upstairs to where she is sleeping outside her mistress’s bedroom, and commands her to meet him in the woods to pick flowers. Her only protection is the reputation she has earned and the relationships she has developed with her master, Henry, and with Rachel Blake; she cannot even tell her mother what has happened. Nancy’s mother, Till, also a slave, is loyal to the system that has trained her and given her the privileges and skills—and manners and class— . Cather, Sapphira (New York: Vintage, ), back cover.

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that she learned from the British housekeeper, Matchem. Cather suggests that in the slavocracy, the bonds among and between women, based on gender, are constantly vulnerable to the claims of dominance. It is the ideology of the dominant Anglo-Saxon slaveholding class that, in each of these examples, puts a wedge between women. That ideology privileges, we recall, white over black, free over slave, Anglo-Saxon over “immigrant,” wealth over poverty, and man over woman. People living within it must either try to get the most out of the system itself, as best they can, or they must flee, whether literally or mentally. And the traces of the culture of slavery are hard to erase. Even in , the young Cather (as she appears in the novel) shows the signs of white privilege. Because she is sick in bed, the first meeting between Till and her daughter, Nancy, upon Nancy’s return is staged to take place in her sickroom, so she will miss nothing. She finds Nancy’s speech “too precise” and says it “didn’t seem a friendly way to talk”—exactly the words used earlier by local Back Creek people to protest her father’s “foreign accent.” Ominously, she likes the “shade of deference in [Nancy’s] voice when she addressed my mother.” Yet Willa not only represents these feelings, but critiques them as well, even in the scene in question. The last word on Nancy’s speech comes from her mother, Till, who says, “Nancy, darlin’, you talks just like Mrs. Matchem, down at Chestnut Hill! I loves to hear you.” The fact that Till’s unconscious critique of Willa’s unspoken prejudice emerges from Till’s own socialization into the hierarchy serves as a final reminder of the ironies and complexities of the southern ideology out of which Cather finally wrote herself.

New Paradigms? Willa Cather is, of course, a canonized American writer; until recently, few have thought of her as southern. Katherine Anne Porter, on the other hand, not only is a southern writer, but is also one of those canonized throughout the twentieth century—for stories like “The Grave” and “The Jilting of Granny Wetherall,” the story of a dying woman’s memory of her first, lost romance. Yet Porter’s canonized works misrepresent the bulk of her life and work, for they have little to do with social justice, political life, or cultural diversity, concerns she spent her career considering. A little-known story even now, “Holiday” is an acutely honest exploration of the possibilities of knowing, understanding, and connecting with “the other southern woman.” . Ibid., , , . . Ibid., .

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In “Holiday,” the unnamed narrator stays with a German east-Texas farm family in an effort to recover from a terrible loss. This encounter, at first comforting in its strangeness, turns into a personal connection with a woman whom the narrator initially misidentifies as a servant. Mute, twisted, and darkened by disease, Ottilie seems to find a sense of self and of holiday as well—but the first-person narrator senses she can never cross the boundary to inhabit Ottilie’s other feelings and meanings with her. “Holiday” is the first-person narrative of an unnamed woman—I think it is the Miranda of The Old Order, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and “Old Mortality”—who has come to the Müllers’ farmhouse in the east-Texas country in an effort to recuperate from some unspecified damage done by an unspecified experience. There, the narrator allows the smells and sounds of early spring to work on her. She is especially happy not to understand the language (German); instead of a register of demands and obligations, it becomes for her another sound to bathe in. The narrator calls the household “patriarchal”: Mr. Müller is also the most powerful man in the community. He reads Das Kapital as his bible. The story turns on the unnamed narrator’s relationship with and representations of the character, Ottilie, whom she believes to be a servant girl. While the rest of the family carries on its regularized life shaped by rituals of birth, marriage, and death, and by the repetition of farm chores, Ottilie runs along the margins of the family, cooking and serving all the food, shaking with palsy, tripping over herself, addressed exclusively within her labor function, and utterly mute. The reader concludes (before the narrator does) that Ottilie is in fact a member of the family. In a critical scene, Ottilie shows the narrator a photograph of a little girl of five and, apparently in some pain, points repeatedly to it and to herself. The narrator responds by changing her initial representation of Ottilie as a servant: “[F]or an instant some filament lighter than cobweb spun itself out between that living center in her and in me . . . , so that her life and mine were kin, even a part of each other, and the painfulness and strangeness of her vanished. She knew well that she had been Ottilie . . . , and she was Ottilie still within herself.” The confidence of this claim is shaken, however, when Ottilie retreats into her “own secret existence,” and the next encounter between the two occurs only after the mother of the family suddenly dies. While the family is at the funeral, the narrator, who has stayed home, hears what she thinks is “the . Porter, “Holiday,” in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (San Diego: Harvest, ), –. . Ibid., .

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howling of a dog” coming from below; she discovers Ottilie in the kitchen, apparently distraught, and waving at the funeral procession now shaped into a “formal order.” She puts Ottilie in the carriage to take her to join the procession, and there touches Ottilie’s physical body for the first time: I caught hold of her stout belt with my free hand, and my fingers slipped between her clothes and bare flesh, ribbed and gaunt and dry against my knuckles. My sense of her realness, her humanity, this shattered being that was a woman, was so shocking to me that a howl as doglike and despairing as her own rose in me unuttered and died again, to be a perpetual ghost. Ottilie slanted her eyes and peered at me, and I gazed back. . . . [S]uddenly she laughed out . . . and clapped her hands for joy.

Realizing that she has misread Ottilie once again, by assuming she is grieving and wants to join the procession, the narrator now drives Ottilie on a “stolen holiday” down to her own favorite spot near the river. As she leaves, she knows they will be back in plenty of time for Ottilie to cook supper, and she ends the story with, “They need not even know she had been gone.” Yet it is Ottilie whom the narrator at first sees as the only “whole” person in the group—whole and belonging nowhere. At this point in her story, the narrator feels herself to be “divided into many fragments.” She also believes Ottilie is the “servant girl.” As the story proceeds, the narrator abandons this representation of Ottilie, this notion of Ottilie’s (or anyone’s) wholeness, and at the same time this negatively charged evaluation of her own split self. She works instead toward a formulation of subjectivity that does not rely on an illusory wholeness that can live nowhere, nor, it goes without saying, on the truncated sense of one’s place and identity that comes in exchange for submission to the will of the father, but on a positive reevaluation of her representation of herself as “divided” and disseminated. In this reevaluation, the narrator continues to disclaim a stable, unified subject; instead, she becomes aware that her own instability and disunity allow connection and growth. Instability of identity thus facilitates the process of subject construction itself. Now, the metaphor of bodily lack and loss in relationships, which she used earlier (“having left or lost a part of myself in every. . . death of someone near to me that had carried into the grave some part of my living cells”), instead becomes a metaphor of the spiritual productivity of the body: a living filament spins itself out between the two women. Still later, the touch of . Ibid., . . Ibid., , .

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the body produces the final shared and wordless holiday. In Porter’s critique, the normative southern relational practice is repressive and driven by the law. When the narrator takes Ottilie away from the family ritual, then, Porter suggests a viable alternative, a way of relating that makes life that comes from the margins of the patriarchal family, a guest and a rejected daughter. In Porter’s alternative, the demands of language for a subject and an object become the possibility of a language that speaks subject to subject. Ottilie’s muteness is part of a figuration of language throughout the story that can be thought of in the context of the difficulties of adequate representation. As a mute, Ottilie makes her desires known only with difficulty. Yet as a mute, she can also be seen to participate in that position outside of the symbolic that Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic. Roughly equivalent to pre-Oedipal primary process or to Jacques Lacan’s imaginary, the semiotic is a place of “ceaseless heterogeneity” before the individual’s separation from the mother. To enter the symbolic—that is, to gain the possibility of signifying that is the reward for separation—is normally to repress the semiotic, which then occupies a disruptive role like Freud’s unconscious. Recall that it is precisely the experience of prelinguistic experience, of unintelligible sound, that allowed the narrator to begin to work through her own suffering and to reenter the symbolic so that eventually she can tell us this story. The meaningless, repetitive sounds of the cows and rain and the trees, and especially of the German tongue, have given her an empowering experience of the pre-Oedipal. German is Ottilie’s father tongue, her native language; for her, it is the language of structures, demands, and identities. Unlike the narrator, Ottilie will never gain power in the symbolic. So her muteness represents for the narrator, at this equivocal moment, not only the benefits of entering the semiotic but also the costs, in a phallocentric culture, of remaining on this outlaw holiday. Ottilie’s apparent struggles to represent herself, then, are legible as such because of the narrator’s brief holiday in the semiotic and because of her eventual return to the symbolic. The joyride will return to the agrarian household, to Ottilie’s labor, and to the narrator’s voice. Gayatri Spivak raised the question of “the other woman” for feminist theory in her translation of “Draupadi” by Bengali novelist Mahasveta Devi. In her introduction to the  collection in which it appeared, Elizabeth Abel noted that “as Western readers, female and male, we are blind to the . Ibid., . . Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .

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radical difference of Third World sexual politics.” Porter articulates this question by asking, more precisely, “How can the other woman be represented? by whom? and with what effects?” These are questions characteristic of southern women writers. The tiny holiday within “Holiday” that the narrator takes in the cart with Ottilie is a cautious, limited, and temporary response. The narrator has seen that her own differing and changing representations of Ottilie have produced different effects, on herself no less than on Ottilie and her family. By the end of the story, the narrator has no stable knowledge about Ottilie except that she is another subject like herself, and even that notion she knows to be a deliberate fiction. Yet the point is that the narrator’s shifting representations themselves energize the relationship and permit both characters to develop trust and to change. That is, although Ottilie is finally unrepresentable in any stable way, yet still she requires representation as a human subject in order to become legible as and to behave as a signifying subject. If nothing else, the narrator’s holiday within her holiday has marked a departure, however temporary, from the stable and coercive representational structures, relational possibilities, and dichotomous subject constructions of the patriarchal agrarian household. Ottilie’s changing responses to the narrator indicate that she too has taken a holiday from coercive structures and interpretations. When “Holiday”’s narrator first encounters Ottilie, she represents her as the servant girl and the only whole person in the group. By the end of the story, that wholeness has been exposed as an illusory product of the representational practices of the Müller family. Yet the overdetermined liberal zeal of the outsider-narrator to offer Ottilie an alternative way of being represented by taking her to her mother’s funeral produces an unexpected effect. Ottilie names herself as human, but not as the narrator expects. When the “other” speaks, she is full of surprises. Thus, the narrator comes finally to doubt her own capacity to represent the other woman in any sense of the word. Yet she takes pleasure rather than discouragement from this incapacity, because she sees now that Ottilie is fully capable of self-representation, and even of translating those representations from muteness and from her native tongue. As for “Holiday,” we might ask if the characters’ implied return to the patriarchal household and to their roles there drains the power of the narrator’s doubts and discoveries about representation and subject construction. Does . Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . “Draupadi” appears on –.

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the holiday finally fail? Is there a way to represent the semiotic within a symbolic whose very structure makes the semiotic unrepresentable? Can women carry out a revolution in poetic language effectively? Zora Neale Hurston’s well-known novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, written from “inside” southern black culture and “inside” a light-skinned black woman’s consciousness, has little to do with white women, at least explicitly. White women make an appearance in the courtroom when Janie is on trial for the murder of Tea Cake; they seem to offer sympathy. Otherwise, it is the whiteness of black women that informs racial issues in the novel. Because of her light color—her mother and her grandmother were raped by white men—Janie carries a sign of desirability and of class with her wherever she goes within the black world. Joe no doubt chooses her in part for her near whiteness, represented by her long hair. And late in the novel, on the muck, Mrs. Taylor tries to “class her off” with other light-skinned blacks, to separate her from her dark lover, Tea Cake. It is only when she moves to Seraph on the Suwannee that Hurston crosses over into the narratives of the people named by the culture as “white women.” Seraph, a novel whose reputation is undeservedly bad, tells the story of a white woman whose life weirdly parallels Janie’s. But instead of a vision of bee and blossom joined, Arvay finds rape beneath her tree, even though she feels during the rape the same “pain remorseless sweet” that Janie feels alone. Instead of a mystical experience joining body and spirit, like Janie’s, Arvay finds beneath her tree that “Heaven [is] further away than folks made out it was.” And unlike Janie who leaves her beloved Tea Cake and returns home to live alone, in conversation with a female friend, Arvay surrenders to Jim: “‘Whither thou goest, I will go along too,’” she tells him, for, the narrator tells us, “Jim was hers, and it was her privilege to serve him.” Serving now means mothering the “little boy” inside the “over-powering general” that, Arvay concludes, is only the “outside Jim.” What is the effect of seeing these parallels? What are the implications of Hurston’s writing across racial boundaries to enter a white southern woman’s subjectivity? In brief, Hurston has constructed a walloping assault on the construction of southern white womanhood. From start to finish, we see a character afflicted with narcissism, self-doubt, humorlessness, no sense of play, and little sense of life. Even—especially—in her final choice, to assert . Hurston, Their Eyes (; reprint, New York: Harper and Row Perennial Library, ), , ; Seraph on the Suwannee (; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, HarperPerennial, ), , –, .

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herself by giving herself up, she conforms to the self-splitting requirements of southern patriarchy. It is the father’s voice she obeys from start to finish; though Hurston may not have fully intended the contrast, Janie’s refusal to obey the father’s voice—to obey Tea Cake under any circumstances, including his rabid madness—saves her life and her soul.

Conclusion Mary Helen Washington, in her introductions to her collections of black women’s writings, takes up the question of relationships between black and white women. In the earlier volume, Black-Eyed Susans, she argues, “The white woman as she appears in the literature of black women is almost always described in negative terms” as “a callous and indifferent” employer, a “phony liberal,” a “racist,” a snob. And “without exception, she is always condescending to the black woman.” As a result, it is painful and difficult for black women to articulate their feelings about white women. Nevertheless, Washington devotes a section to the subject of “The Black Woman and the Myth of the White Woman.” Later, in Midnight Birds, a collection of more contemporary stories, Washington observes that the material she has chosen, Alice Walker’s “Advancing Luna and Ida B. Wells,” “does not have the mute, painful, and bewildered quality of the confrontations [between black and white women] in Black-Eyed Susans.” If there is no reconciliation, at least, asserts Washington, “the women are real to each other.” These seem appropriate thoughts with which to end a survey of “other southern women” and the voices of the fathers in southern women’s writings. As the millennium turned, it seemed clear that diversity was the direction being followed: more women in the South would become more real to each other, and more writers would help to make this possible by representing their stories. As Washington notes, “with the loss of innocence, with the wisdom derived from suffering and disillusionment, they both [black and white women] may have achieved a new power and the courage to negotiate the chasm.”

. Hurston, Seraph on the Suwannee, . . Washington, ed., Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, ), xviii; Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, ), xx. See also Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, – (New York: Anchor Press Books, ). Washington, Midnight Birds, xxi.

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o begin with the obvious question: Why am I, a Yankee, writing about southern women and religion? I was born in Ohio and educated at Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton College, the one in Illinois. I studied the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago. I wrote my dissertation on the Second Great Awakening, revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, and the impact of that revival on women, the early women’s rights advocates of New England, New York, and the western frontier—Ohio. When I first taught church history at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, my students accused me—and probably rightly so—of teaching Yankee history. I was reared as a holiness-fundamentalist in the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination and was educated as an evangelical at Wheaton. The Bible Belt we knew stretched from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. The buckle was either in Wheaton, Illinois, or Grand Rapids, Michigan. In that world, southerners were not evangelical. Indeed, they barely qualified as real Christians at all. They not only smoked, but they also grew tobacco. And then, of course, slavery and segregation complicated matters. It was not always clear to me whether we Yankee fundamentalists agreed or disagreed with southerners about those latter matters, but we knew that what they were doing was wrong. But I have lived now in the South continuously since . Because that is longer than most of my students, I believe I have gained some insights into the nature of southern religion and women’s roles in it. Besides, it appears that few people have been studying or writing very much about women and religion in the South.

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Norma Taylor Mitchell, in her article “Women in Religion” in the  Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, declared, “No field in American religious history is whiter for scholarly harvest than the interaction between women and religion in the South.” She noted that despite all of the work in women’s history, “one has to scavenge to find more than a handful that treat the relationships between women and religion in the South extensively, reliably, or creatively. Southern religious scholarship still awaits a history of women and religion.” And it still does, but I will give it a try. Now that I have been living here for a while, I realize that many southerners think that they are the real Christians in this country, or at least that they are more Christian than anyone else in the country. Certainly, more Baptists, both black and white, live in the South than anywhere else in the country. Southerners are fairly sure that the Bible Belt really runs from the Churches of Christ in Abilene, Texas, to the studios of Pat Robertson’s  Club in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And the belt can be buckled most anywhere along the way—at the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies in Dallas, Texas; the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi; the Nashville headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC); the Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky; Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina; Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Christian College in Lynchburg, Virginia; or any snake-handling Pentecostal church in the hollows of Appalachia. Pollster George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli, in their survey, The People’s Religion, found in  that indeed “the South has the most homogeneous [religious] profile.” The South is the most heavily Protestant region of the country;  percent of us are Protestant, with only  percent Roman Catholic. In the Southeast alone,  percent are Protestant with only  percent Roman Catholic. Forty-two percent of the population of the whole region is Baptist; make that  percent in the Southeast. Twelve percent of those in the Southeast are Methodist (the only region where Catholics are not number one or two). Sixty-five percent of southerners report that religion is “very important” to them, and it is most important to those in the Southeast. Church membership is also highest among southerners, with  percent claiming membership. Southerners also claim to attend church more regularly than anyone else in the country— percent told researchers that they had attended church within the past week. Seventy-four percent say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Only  percent of southerners say . Mitchell, “Women in Religion,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill (Macon: Mercer University Press, ), .

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they have no religious affiliation at all; that is the lowest percentage by far of any region. Gallup labels as “evangelicals” all who define themselves as “Born-Again Christians.” He found that  percent of all such “evangelicals” live in the South. Baptists make up  percent of the total U.S. population; half of those belong to the Southern Baptist Convention; another major chunk are members of the large black Baptist denominations. Sixty-one percent of all Baptists live in the South. Americans are a very religious people. Gallup found that  percent say they believe in God,  percent pray regularly, and  percent believe God loves them. And in virtually every category, women are more religious than men. Religion is “very important” to  percent of men and  percent of women. Prayer is “very important” to  percent of men and  percent of women. Attending church is “very important” to  percent of men and  percent of women. While  percent of men said they attended church in the past week,  percent of women did. Gallup also found that women were more likely to identify themselves as “a religious person” as they age. Gallup concludes that “women, southerners, those over  and college graduates are the most likely to attend church in a given week.” Since I am, and I do, perhaps I am qualified to examine women and religion in the South.

History In the beginning, the South was home to a variety of Native American tribes, all with their own distinctive religions. When Europeans arrived, the British established the Church of England in Jamestown, Charleston, and Savannah. German Pietists, also known as Moravians, moved to Georgia and then to North Carolina. French Huguenots established a church in Charleston, and French Catholics settled in Louisiana. Spanish Catholics built missions in Texas. Jews gathered minyans in Savannah and Charleston. Some of the African slaves were Muslim. Given this religious diversity, one might have predicted a peaceful, pluralistic patchwork of southern religion.

. Gallup and Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the ’s (New York: Macmillan, ), –, . . Ibid., , –. . Ibid., , –, . . Albert J. Raboteau, African-American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, ), .

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But thousands of Native Americans died of European diseases; whole tribes disappeared. Those left were robbed of their lands and marched down the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. There and elsewhere they were forcibly “Christianized.” The Church of England became the established church in the colonies of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, but it was primarily the church of the elite, the plantation owners. When the Loyalist clergy fled during the Revolution, establishment dissolved. Some Anglicans became Episcopalians; others became Methodists. The Scotch Irish who moved into Appalachia from the middle colonies preferred Presbyterian churches. Methodist circuit rider Francis Asbury arrived to plant Wesleyanism. South Carolina slaves along the Savannah River were permitted to form the Silver Bluff Baptist Church. Leaders from that congregation founded a similar church in Savannah. On the plantations, other slaves were participating in their own “invisible institution.” During the first Great Awakening in the s, English evangelist George Whitefield preached to crowds in Savannah and Charleston as well as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In  and , during several “sacramental seasons” at Gaspar River and Cane Ridge, Kentucky, revival again broke out with extraordinary fervor. Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist clergy preached; thousands of people wailed and prayed, jerked and barked like dogs, laughed and laid slain in the Spirit for hours. The Methodists and Baptists reaped the harvest, east to Virginia and the Carolinas, south through Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Baptists gathered strength quickly with their congregational polity able to constitute a church immediately and raise up their own ministers. The Methodists moved methodically, planting churches and nurturing them with faithful circuit-riding preachers and a national structure. In many congregations, whites were in charge, but black slaves vastly outnumbered them. For example, in  a church in Georgetown, South Carolina, had  white members and  black members. In Natchez, Mississippi, a church had  whites and  blacks. Trouble was brewing. Quakers began denouncing slavery when John Woolman wrote Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes in  and . When the Methodists gathered in Baltimore to organize their denomination at the Christmas Conference in , they banned slave owners from membership. . Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ). . C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, ), .

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For sixty years, the rule was ignored as Methodism spread across the South and became America’s largest denomination. However, in the s, northern Methodists took up the cry of abolition. And denominations began to splinter. In , the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church upheld the rule against slaveholders; consequently, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), was formed in Louisville, Kentucky, on May , . When Baptist missionary societies took a stand against slavery, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in Augusta, Georgia, also in May . The Presbyterian Church in the United States was formed in . Episcopal bishops in the Confederacy ignored the national church during the war, but afterward they quietly returned to the general convention. At the war’s end, African Americans were free to form their own churches. Some joined already existing denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion. In , most of those still within the MECS withdrew to form the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church). Others formed the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., and the National Baptist Convention of America. Thus, the South’s religious landscape was outlined. Episcopalians and Presbyterians have attracted the elites and the upwardly mobile. The vast majority have been Methodist and Baptist, whether black or white. In the late nineteenth century, the Holiness movement entered southern religion, a movement more open to female leadership. Arising from Wesley’s emphasis on sanctification or Christian perfection, the Holiness movement in the American church was distilled into an instantaneous experience by two New York City sisters, Sarah Lankford and Phoebe Palmer. Their Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness spread the Word during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Southerners took up the cause in the s. A National Campmeeting for the Promotion of Holiness was held in Augusta, Georgia, in . The MECS establishment became increasingly antagonistic to the movement, however. Ridicule and punishment of Holiness preachers only strengthened the movement. The MECS banned the movement from its churches in . New and separate churches were created. When the Pentecostal movement burst forth on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in , a number of people from the South traveled west to see what was happening and to bring the blessing home. Most of the Holiness people in the South became Pentecostal. The first denomination to be incorporated was Charles Harrison Mason’s Church of God in Christ, now headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, the largest African American Pentecostal denomina-

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tion. Larger white Pentecostal denominations include the Assemblies of God, centered in Springfield, Missouri, and the Church of God and the Church of God Prophecy, both headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee. The Pentecostal Holiness Church has a college and a press located in Franklin Springs, Georgia. These movements heightened the emotional fervor of southern religion. For nearly a century, the major southern churches stood apart. Although that separation became ingrained in the southern psyche, some slowly adopted a more national vision again. In , Methodists north and south became simply the Methodist Church (the  addition of the Evangelical United Brethren Church made it the United Methodist Church). Yet some held out and remain the Southern Methodist Church. As southern Presbyterians moved into closer fellowship with their northern siblings, conservatives withdrew in  to form the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), headquartered in Atlanta. In , the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church, U.S., agreed to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), with national offices and publishing houses from Philadelphia and Atlanta merged in Louisville, Kentucky. The reunification was completed in . The Southern Baptist Convention has resisted the trend and remains separate.

Women’s Roles In this religious history, southern women have played key roles. In the American South (as elsewhere through the ages), women have generally accounted for two-thirds of the members of Christian congregations. Since the Civil War, they have gradually emerged as lay leaders and clergy. Several developments have contributed to this trend. One is the development of women’s organizations, regional and national. A second is increased educational opportunities for women and increasing professionalization open to women. Southern women have always been part of the workforce—from slaves and domestics to mistresses overseeing plantations for their absent husbands. In the twentieth century, many women worked in textile factories. As those jobs have disappeared, women have moved into an increasing array of employment opportunities, including religious work. And finally, immigration into the region from other parts of the United States and the world has led to an increasing religious diversity in the South. Women have worked tirelessly in the realm of education. A number of northern women came south after the Civil War to teach the freed slaves. For example, Joanna P. Moore (b. ), a Baptist who embraced Holiness,

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worked among freed slaves in Arkansas and Louisiana. She preached, started churches, fostered schools, and founded nursing homes for elderly black women. In the late nineteenth century, as women worked successfully against alcohol and drugs, Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) chapters were formed across the South. Among the WCTU’s most successful organizers was Charleston native Sarah Flournoy Moore Chapin (ca. –, better known as “Sallie”), daughter of a Methodist minister who died at a camp meeting. Mrs. W. C. Sibley, a Presbyterian, led the Georgia Union. Her husband owned the Sibley Cotton Mills. Caroline E. Merrick (– ), born on a Louisiana plantation, was the daughter of an old South Carolina family. Her father’s third wife was an eminent pioneer educator, Susan Brewer. Caroline’s husband became chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. These women and so many others worked to eliminate the evils of alcohol and drugs. Some of them also worked hard for woman suffrage. Of course, the story has been told many times of how twenty-four-yearold Harry Burn from a rural district in east Tennessee and the youngest member of the Tennessee House of Representatives cast the deciding vote to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Despite pressure from the political leaders of his district, Harry voted for suffrage because his mother, an ardent suffragist, wrote him a letter saying, “Hurrah! And vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were very bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have noticed nothing yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt [Carrie Chapman Catt] put the ‘Rat’ in Ratification.” Religious women were already exercising their vote locally where possible to combat the liquor traffic and to improve education. They were beginning to ask for the vote in religious governing bodies. Other southern women made names for themselves and became role models for others on foreign mission fields. Baptists remember the three Moon sisters from the Charlottesville, Virginia, area. The eldest, Orianna, perhaps the first southern woman to receive a medical degree, was the only woman commissioned as a surgeon in the Confederate army. In , the youngest, Edmonia, was one of the first two single women to be appointed by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. She and her sister Lottie served in China. Although Edmonia soon took sick and returned home, Lottie (–) stayed and became a legend. Lottie gradu. Moore, “In Christ’s Stead”: Autobiographical Sketches (Chicago: Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society, ). . Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum, ), .

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ated with the first class of Hollins Institute, a pioneer women’s college in , and founded a school for girls in Cartersville, Georgia. In China, she devoted herself to education and evangelism. When famine struck China during the revolution in , she shared her meager resources with the people and starved with them until her health broke. She died en route home on Christmas Day, . Each year, Southern Baptists raise millions of dollars in the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions. Despite strong cultural resistance to women’s organizational efforts, in  women of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, were the first in a southern denomination to organize a separate Woman’s Missionary Society of the Board of Missions (later the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society). Led by very strong and committed women, it was the first region-wide women’s organization. Mrs. Willie Elizabeth Harding McGavock (–) was the corresponding secretary from  until her death in . Born in Tennessee, she became a Christian at age ten and remained a member of McKendree Church in Nashville for the rest of her life. In , she married David McGavock. She developed a vision for foreign missions and in  petitioned the MECS General Conference to organize a women’s group. Her second appeal in  was successful, and as her biographer notes, she became “the pulse of the whole machine.” Her great executive abilities, even in the midst of physical illness and personal sorrows, built a strong organization. The Woman’s Missionary Society’s first recruits included the Rankin sisters, Lochie and Dora, who were sent to China. Lochie Rankin taught in China for forty-nine years. Southern Methodists also revere the name of Laura Haygood (–). Born in Watkinsville, Georgia, she was reared in Atlanta, where her mother conducted school. After solid training at her mother’s school and at Wesleyan Female College, she taught at Girls’ High School in Atlanta and conducted the “normal class” for teachers. She too felt the call to China and arrived in Shanghai in . She fostered education in many forms and finally founded the McTyeire School for girls in . Kentuckian Lucinda B. Helm fostered Methodist home missions in the postbellum period. Her plan for a Woman’s Department of Church Extension for Parsonage Building was approved in . As general secretary, she produced all of the group’s communications and did all of the organizing. Within four years, she had established groups involving more than seven thousand women in thirty-six conferences across the South. The  General Confer. Jean Miller Schmidt, Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism, – (Nashville: Abingdon Press, ), –. . Ibid., .

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ence, reflecting Helm’s broad vision, officially recognized the group as the Woman’s Parsonage and Home Mission Society (HMS). Ill health forced Helm to retire as general secretary in , but she edited the journal until her death in . Belle Harris Bennett (–) carried on Helm’s work. Inspired by the example of her Kentucky neighbor suffragist Laura Clay, and by a religious experience at New York’s Chautauqua campground, Bennett served for twenty-five years as president of the HMS (–) and its successor, the Woman’s Missionary Council (–). In , her efforts led to the founding of Scarrit Bible and Training College to train young women as both foreign and home missionaries. She also became a crusader for the needs of women and children in the burgeoning cities and established a settlement house in Nashville in . Bennett helped establish more than forty Wesley Community Houses for native whites and immigrants, and Bethlehem Houses for blacks. In , she persuaded the church to endorse a deaconess program to staff these works. She continually preached against racial prejudice during the Jim Crow era, and persuaded her southern sisters to join the Council on Interracial Cooperation following World War I. In , the General Conference of the MECS, composed of only male delegates, ordered the unification of the Home Missionary Society with the more conservative Foreign Missionary Society and the subordination of both to the Board of Missions. Not having been consulted, the women received a rude awakening. Led by Belle Harris Bennett, they began in  to agitate for laity rights, voting rights for women within the General Convention. Although they succeeded in , in  only  of the  delegates were women. Other women recognized the evils of Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and began to work for interracial cooperation. White and black women worked together and separately in the WCTU, the suffrage movement, and the churches. They struggled with racial issues in the Young Women’s Christian Association. They worked to educate African American young people and to fight the scourge of lynching. Born near Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune (– ) was the fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves. Her education began in a small mission school. In , she received a scholarship to Scotia Seminary, a Presbyterian school, in Concord, North Carolina, and graduated in . Intending to become a missionary to Africa, she attended what later became Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. She applied to the Presby. Ibid., –, .

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terian Mission Board, only to be told she was not needed. So she returned to the South to teach at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. While teaching in Sumter, South Carolina, she met Albertus Bethune. They married in . In , she moved to Palatka, Florida, and then to Daytona Beach, where she established in  the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. In , she opened a hospital for blacks; in , it was taken over by the city. In , she appealed to the Methodist Church’s Board of Education for Negroes for help in upgrading her institute into a college. The school was merged with Cookman Institute in Jacksonville and became coeducational. In , it was officially renamed Bethune-Cookman College. She maintained personal control until she moved into federal service in  (she remained president until ). During this period, Bethune was also very active in the National Association of Colored Women. She served as president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women from  to . In , she created the National Council of Negro Women in New York City. The organization united several black women’s organizations to fight discrimination and segregation. She represented the group at the  founding of the United Nations. In , she became director of the Division of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. In myriad ways, Mary McLeod Bethune worked to give black youth wider educational and training opportunities and to promote wider employment opportunities for blacks. Jessie Daniel Ames (–), a white woman who also worked for racial justice, was born in east Texas. Following the lead of her mother, a staunch Methodist and social activist, Ames first became involved in the Texas Equal Suffrage Association. After Texas became the first southern state to approve the Nineteenth Amendment, Ames poured her energies into the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the Democratic Party, and various social reforms. In , a widow with three children to support, she became director of the Texas council of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. In , she moved to Atlanta to become the director of its Woman’s Committee. In , she founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. With the association, she worked through the women’s organizations of all the Protestant churches to combat the excuse that lynching served to protect white womanhood and to mobilize religious women as a force of restraint against . Elaine M. Smith, “Bethune, Mary McLeod,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, ), –.

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male violence. She worked with the association until its dissolution in . From  to , she lived in Tryon, North Carolina, remaining active in local Democratic politics and social reform activities. Mrs. Nannie Helen Burroughs (ca. –) launched her career in religious leadership in  with an address to the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., in Richmond, Virginia, titled “How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping.” For forty-eight years she served as corresponding secretary of the Woman’s Convention before becoming president of the organization in . She and other Baptist women began the convention in  primarily to support missions, but its work included a wide range of educational and charitable activities. Burroughs helped establish the National Training School for Women and Girls, which opened in Washington, D.C., in . While men monopolized the spotlight in the civil rights movement, many women could be found among the foot soldiers. As Leslie W. Dunbar says, “church people (especially women) were at the forefront of every reform effort within the white South.” Rosa Parks had been involved in the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before she refused to move to the back of that Montgomery bus in . Although local Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. became the spokesperson for the movement, women kept the bus boycott alive.

Women Preachers Southern women kept pace with their Yankee sisters in terms of service to humanity. Inspired and strengthened by their faith, they have worked to better education, clean up the cities, lift up the poor, care for the sick, protect the vulnerable, and generally make the world a better place for themselves and their families. Southern women not only volunteered for the foreign mission field but also preached the gospel at home. For example, in the s and s, the . Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, – (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), –; Milton C. Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham: Duke University Press, ), . . Dunbar, “Civil Rights Movement,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Hill, .

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Cumberland Presbyterian Church elected and ordained women as ruling elders. In , they ordained Louisa Woosley, who defended her ministry in an  book, Shall Woman Preach? or, The Question Answered. Male ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, usually led the Holiness movement, but in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee, the Holiness gospel was preached by Mary Lee Wasson Harris Cagle (– ) and her circle of women friends. Born in northern Alabama, Mary Lee Wasson was converted at age fifteen in a Methodist revival. At age twenty, she met evangelist Robert Lee Harris (–). During his meetings, she experienced holiness and felt called to preach. When she married him in , she thought her ministry would be that of a traditional preacher’s wife. On July , , they founded the New Testament Church of Christ. When her husband died later that year, Mary Lee realized that God continued to call her to ministry. On December , , she was ordained in Milan, Tennessee. Also ordained was her colleague in ministry Elliot J. Doboe Sheeks (– ), a native of Kentucky, raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. At age eighteen, E. J. had heard Woosley preach at a camp meeting. Sanctified in a Holiness revival conducted by Robert Harris, Elliot married businessman Edwin H. Sheeks and became a Methodist. When she felt the call to preach, he bought her a tent in which to hold revivals. Eventually, a Memphis church became their base of operations. Another friend, Donie Mitchum, generally pastored the denomination’s home church in Milan while Sheeks and Cagle held revivals and planted churches across the South. Mitchum too was married to a supportive businessman. Mary Lee held meetings with other women evangelists, including Annie Johnson and Trena Platt. In , Mary Lee married Henry Clay Cagle (b. ), a native of Newnan, Georgia, who had been saved and sanctified in her meetings in Texas. The marriage and partnership in ministry lasted fifty years. She was the preacher, he the administrator. The denomination these women nurtured eventually became part of the Church of the Nazarene. In , Fannie McDowell Hunter (b. ca. ) published Women Preachers, containing the stories of seven women in the New Testament Church of Christ: Cagle, Sheeks, Mitchum, Annie May Fisher, Lillian Polle, Fannie Suddarth, and herself, as well as that of Johnny Hill, who later married C. B. Jernigan, a leading minister within another Texas precursor of the Church of the Nazarene. . Barbara Brown Zikmund, “Women and Ordination,” in In Our Own Voices, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, ), .

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Nazarene archivist Robert Stanley Ingersol, in his dissertation on Mary Lee Cagle, notes the following facts concerning the Holiness Church of Christ, which included both Cagle’s and Jernigan’s groups: Of the sect’s  ordained elders in December , there were  clergy couples. Another  women, either single, or like E. J. Sheeks, married to a non-clergy spouse, were on the roll. Thus, nearly one of every six ordained elders were female, and nearly one in every four was either a woman minister or her spouse. Of  licensed preachers, five were women. Seven of eight authorized (evangelists or home missionaries) were women, while six of  ordained (foreign) missionaries were. These figures do not take into account female lay preachers like Donie Mitchum, who at various times evangelized and served as pastors.

African Americans have a saying: “God makes a way out of no way.” Women have often found that way. Although some Pentecostal denominations grant women full ministerial rights, most southern Pentecostals do not. The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) waffled on the issue, but Mississippian Lou Etta Lamb was clear about her calling. She first organized a congregation in her home in Artesia, Mississippi, in . Then she organized a dozen churches throughout Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. When a black church in Artesia was without a minister, the congregation appealed to Lamb for help. She preached for them on Sunday afternoons for two years until they found another pastor. Initially, in , the Church of God recognized its many women minsters and evangelists and gave them voice and vote in the church organization. But beginning in , the church abrogated power and authority to ordained males only. The Methodist Church gave women full ordination in , as did the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. The southern Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. first ordained women in . When eleven women were “irregularly” ordained in  in Philadelphia to the Episcopal Church priesthood, foremost among them was a young woman from North Carolina: Carter Heyward. Among African Americans, a former slave woman named Elizabeth preached in Maryland and Virginia as early as . Holiness evangelist Amanda . Ingersol, “Burden of Dissent: Mary Lee Cagle and the Southern Holiness Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, ), . See also Rebecca Laird, Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation (Kansas City, Mo.: Nazarene Publishing House, ), –. . Mickey Crews, The Church of God: A Social History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ), –. . Zikmund, “Women and Ordination,” .

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Berry Smith, a freed slave originally from Maryland, lived in New York City but traveled widely to camp meetings, to sing, and to give her testimony. She sang at the AME convention in Nashville in . In , the AME elected Baltimore pastor Vashti Murphy McKenzie as its first female bishop. Within the Church of God in Christ, women are officially denied ordination as bishops, pastors, or deacons. However, women are allowed to preach as evangelists and missionaries. Within black Holiness and Pentecostal circles, women have sometimes simply started their own churches and denominations. One of the first ordained women within the Southern Baptist Convention was an African American woman who became a member after previously being ordained elsewhere. Despite the fact that the SBC in  approved a resolution condemning the practice, local congregations have ordained a number of women. Whereas many serve as seminary professors or as chaplains in hospitals, prisons, colleges, or hospice ministries, some do hold positions in local congregations. One who gained the most notoriety, unfortunately not for her outstanding preaching ability, was Nancy Hastings Sehested. She had quietly served on the staff of Oakhurst Baptist Church, a progressive congregation in Decatur, Georgia, but when she was called to be the senior pastor at Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, the state Baptist convention disfellowshipped the congregation. She now quietly serves a small congregation in the mountains of North Carolina. Interestingly, although that greatest of all southern preachers, the Reverend Billy Graham, has transferred the mantle of authority within the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to his son Franklin, by all accounts God has transferred the mantle of preaching power to his daughter Anne Graham Lotz. In , when her father’s association refused to sponsor her work, she set out on a five-city tour sponsored by local committees, just as her father had done in the past. Time magazine’s accounts highlighted meetings in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Southern women have excelled in theological studies, though as theologians they have often had to find employment outside the region. The late Nelle Morton, born in Sullivan County, Tennessee, worked for civil rights in

. “Woman Returns to Her Church, Carrying the New Title of Bishop,” New York Times, July , , A. . See Christianity Today (November , ): . . David Van Biema, “The Preacher’s Daughter,” Time (May , ): –; http:/ www.preachtheword.org/lotz; and Gustav Niebuhr, “A Daughter of Graham Is to Address Evangelists,” New York Times, July , , A.

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the s with the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen before becoming a faculty member at the Theological School of Drew University in New Jersey. North Carolinian Carter Heyward teaches at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her fellow Tarheel, ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon, taught there until called in  to the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Another Tarheel, biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, spent much of her academic life at Union Seminary in New York City, though more recently she has taught part-time at the new, more moderate Baptist seminary, Wake Forest Divinity School. Biblical scholar Renita J. Weems has been at home at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. She dedicated her  book, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets, to her two southern grandmothers whose lives ended prematurely in that nexus of marriage, sex, and violence also found in the South.

Resistance Women have always exercised major influence in southern churches, and southerners have steadily, if slowly, moved toward rejoining the rest of the nation in terms of religion. Today, women increasingly find places for exercising leadership, yet they encounter significant resistance. In the Episcopal Church, a number of women have been ordained in such dioceses as Atlanta, yet southern Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and other areas have been more reluctant to welcome women clergy. The bishop of Fort Worth opposes the ordination of women and refuses to accept the national church’s decision. Some congregations have withdrawn into a separate Anglican communion in order to avoid having women priests. Similar patterns can be seen within the United Methodist Church. Northern Georgia and South Carolina have a number of women pastors; southern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi have far fewer. The separation and growth of the Presbyterian Church in America in the South are a response, in part, to the ordination of women. Indeed, in , four regional districts of the PCA asked the denomination to censure Knoxville pastor John Wood, who now leads the denomination’s fourth-largest congregation, because he simply allowed a woman on the church’s staff to speak in an evening service. Apparently, she gave a report on the church’s ministries to women. Some Baptist . Weems, Battered Love (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ).

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churches and other denominations such as the Associate Reformed Presbyterian (ARP) Church continue to debate whether laywomen should be allowed to be deacons in local churches. The ARP voted in June  to allow women to continue to serve as deacons, but delegates from Mississippi and Arkansas opposed the practice. In the ARP, deacons provide service; they do not preach or make decisions for the local church. The Southern Baptist Convention’s  resolution condemning women’s ordination as unbiblical is illustrative. Writers of the resolution acknowledged that they were bucking the tide. In their final paragraph, they wrote, “we do not decide concerns of Christian doctrine and practice by modern cultural, sociological, and ecclesiastical trends or by emotional factors; . . . we remind ourselves of the dearly bought Baptist principle of the final authority of Scripture in matters of faith and conduct.” In June , the SBC reaffirmed its opposition to women as pastors by amending the Baptist Faith and Message to read: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Obviously, the prohibition is symbolic because all Baptist congregations are autonomous and have the right to ordain whomever they deem to have a call to ministry and gifts for it. Approximately one hundred Southern Baptist women serve as pastors. However, all SBC employees, including seminary faculty, must ascribe to the statement. Mark Chaves notes in his study Ordaining Women that Protestant groups taking a stand against women’s ordination in the twentieth century were largely doing so simply to assert themselves as “conservative” and “biblical” over and against “liberal” groups who adopted the practice. In neither case do the decisions reflect the actual roles that women fulfill within the churches. The  SBC resolution can be seen as simply one salvo in the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination. Since then, what once was the largest Protestant denomination in the United States has become increasingly divided between fundamentalists and “moderates.” In , the SBC increased . Cara Bonnett, “Presbyterians Clash over Whether Women Should Preach,” Greenville News, February , , A, A. This story received the banner headline on page  in the Sunday newspaper. Deb Richardson-Moore, “ARP Church Affirms Women as Deacons,” Greenville News, June , , B. . Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), . . Bill Broadway, “Baptists to Focus on Women as Pastors,” Greenville News, June , , A, A, A; Deb Richardson-Moore, “SBC Says No Female Pastors,” Greenville News, June , , A, A, A; Chaves, Ordaining Women.

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the tension by amending the group’s Faith and Mission statement to say that while husbands are “to provide for, to protect and to lead” their families, wives are to “submit graciously to the servant leadership” of their husbands. Interestingly, one of the leaders of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and in  elected SBC president. He has been married for thirty-five years to Dr. Dorothy Patterson, his childhood sweetheart in Beaumont, Texas. She holds two doctoral degrees, has written a handful of books, has lectured widely, and has visited sixty nations, yet she is strongly supportive of these positions. In fact, she helped to write them. Her essay in the  book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood tells other women that “a salaried job and titled position can inhibit a woman’s natural nesting instinct.” According to Dorothy Patterson, “Keeping the home is God’s assignment to the wife—even down to changing the sheets, doing the laundry and scrubbing the floors.” On the other hand, when she and her husband attended New Orleans Baptist Seminary together in the mid-s, she “took a full course load including Hebrew and Greek, typed the papers for both of them and did office work. She got the better grades.” One newspaper account reports that she was also sick a lot and lost one baby. Certainly, many southern women regard the Baptists’ statements regarding women as simply the New Testament teachings of the apostle Paul. On the other hand, for a significant group of Southern Baptists, the statements have become a watershed event. In November , the . million member Baptist General Convention of Texas repudiated the teaching, and the Virginia Baptist Convention has made similar statements. In October , former president Jimmy Carter declared that he and his wife, Rosalyn, were severing their own very public ties with the Southern Baptist Convention over the issues. Declaring that the recent decisions about women’s roles “violate the basic premises of my Christian faith,” President Carter said, “I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel . Allison Askins, “Southern Baptists Defend ‘Submit’: ‘It’s Not about Headship, Dictatorship,’” Columbia State, June , , A. . Patterson, “The High Calling of Wife and Mother in Biblical Perspective,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Gruden (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, ), , ; Mary Otto, “New Southern Baptist President, Wife Say Wifely Submission Can Bring Freedom,” Greenville News, , .

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that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Christ in the church.” Despite all of the Southern Baptist rhetoric, southern women are attending college in increasing numbers. They are entering the higher employment ranks and earning salaries comparable to men’s. Indeed, a great many southern women have always been in the workforce—domestic service for many African American women and textile mills for many white women. Whatever the “biblical” or cultural ideals, poverty in the South has always demanded that many women do work for hire outside or inside their own homes. Young women may mouth the rhetoric of submission because the Baptist hierarchy has declared it to be the only biblical interpretation, but they have not abandoned either their educational or their career goals. In the twenty-first century, women will continue to gain the economic resources that undergird social equality. And the church will learn to cope with it.

Diversity Protestants in the South are also slowly recognizing the fact that they are not the only game in town. Religion in the South is becoming increasingly diverse and pluralistic. Some of the diversity comes from former Southern Baptists. A well-known Christian writer and the wife of a Southern Baptist minister, Sue Monk Kidd rather stunned many readers with her  book, Dance of a Dissident Daughter. It chronicled her spiritual journey from a loyal daughter of the Christian church through Christian feminism to a more direct worship of the feminine Holy. Her critiques of the patriarchal and misogynist teachings within Christianity are biting and pointed. A trip to ancient sites on the island of Crete confirmed her feelings that there was a feminist alternative. She now finds spiritual sustenance from women’s circles whose rituals focus on the Great Goddess. Many southern women have come to similar conclusions through two studies sponsored by local Unitarian Universalist Fellowships: Cakes for the

. Kristen Wyatt, “Carter Quits Southern Baptists,” Greenville News, October , , A; Somini Sengupta, “Carter Sadly Turns Back on National Baptist Body,” New York Times, October , ; Michelle Koidin, “Texas Baptists Reject Wifely Submission,” Greenville News, November , , A. . Kidd, Dissident Daughter (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, ); Dale Neal, “Great Goddess Has Bible Belt Following,” Greenville News, December , , B.

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Queen of Heaven and Rise Up and Call Her Name: The Goddess around the World. In many communities, women come together in small groups devoted to recovering the worship of the divine feminine. Because these groups are ad hoc and lack any larger sustaining organization, they are prone to dissolution when the leadership burns out or moves. Some Unitarian and some independent groups are more overtly pagan or Wiccan. The United States Army learned this when pagan and Wiccan soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, asked for permission and space to worship on the post. According to the Military Pagan Network, based in Columbia, Maryland, about ten thousand pagans are now serving in the military. An estimated two hundred to four hundred are stationed at Fort Bragg. Time magazine reported on a similar group at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, the military’s largest U.S. base. Wiccans draw on what they understand to be pre-Christian European tribal religions. Some worship God and Goddess, others are more strictly Goddess oriented. The naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, now has a mosque and three Muslim chaplains to minister to a growing Islamic population. Muslims in Greenville, South Carolina, have rebuilt their Islamic Center after their previous worship center was torched. While Greenville’s Muslim population is primarily made up of Arab immigrants, larger cities such as Atlanta have mosques composed primarily of African Americans. “Mosque Islam” is predominately male—although in , Minister Ava Muhammad was appointed a regional representative and imam of a Nation of Islam mosque in Atlanta. Immigrant women are more likely to practice their faith in the home. However, women are also attracted to other Islamic practices, especially those of Sufism or mystical Islam. A major national workshop on Sufi spirituality was held in  near Black Mountain, North Carolina. A festival on “Rumi and the Murshidas: Women Teachers in the Path” honoring the great Muslim mystic also took place in Chapel Hill. A “Sufi Camp” was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. Across the South, women and some men gather regularly to participate in Dances of Universal Peace. South Carolina has a sizable Baha’i population, with an international training center and communications hub near Conway. Baha’i originated among

. “Wiccan Soldiers Want to Worship on Post,” Greenville News, August , , B; S. C. Gwynne, “‘I Saluted a Witch,’” Time (July , ): . . Glen Elsasser, “U.S. Military Finds Religion Can Be a Minefield, Too,” Greenville News, July , , G. . Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, ), .

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Muslims in Persia (now Iran). It is a monotheistic faith that incorporates respect for the founders and scriptures of all the world’s major religions. It seeks to unite all people through a common language, universal education, equality of women and men, respect for all races, and universal justice. Jews have been a part of southern life since the beginning, from Richmond and Charleston to west Texas, but in the past century, they have become more visible with temples and synagogues even in smaller cities. The influx of northern Jewish retirees was first evident in Florida, but is also becoming more visible in other areas such as the Carolina Piedmont. Florida and the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas have seen an influx of Caribbean immigrants with their unique mixtures of Roman Catholic Christianity and African religions. New Orleans has long been famous for the practice of Voudun, but this Haitian practice is being joined by Cubans practicing Santeria, Brazilian followers of Candomble, and African Americans drawn by Yoruba rituals imported directly from Africa. A Yoruba village has been built near Beaufort, South Carolina. Of course, the African practices of conjure and “root doctoring” survive across the South among African Americans, now being joined by Hispanic curanderos. The Protestant hegemony in the South is eroding quietly beneath its surface bravado. Roman Catholics are coming from several directions. In the southern suburbs, Roman Catholic churches are being built by those who have been transferred south by their companies or who have come looking for a better life in the New South economy. Along more mean city streets and in some surprising rural hollows, there are increasing numbers of Hispanic Catholics—and Hispanics who give new flavor to Baptist and Pentecostal Christianity. The shortage of Catholic priests means that many of the Roman Catholics will find their parishes run and their daily pastoral needs met by women—nuns and seminary-trained laywomen. The South is also seeing more ethnic diversity. Although history in the South has been almost entirely written in black and white, one now finds Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese populations. Most are Christian, products of successful missionary enterprises. Indian and other Southeast Asian groups are building centers and temples devoted to Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist worship.

Conclusion If the past is prologue, what is the future likely to bring? Certainly, the South will continue to attract workers and retirees from other parts of the country and around the globe. As they bring their religious beliefs with them,

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the South will continue to become more diverse and pluralistic in its religious population. This may not be without significant conflict and tensions, but it will come. People will begin to learn about each other and become more comfortable with diversity. The women of the South will probably continue to be a very religious lot, especially since there seems to be serious interest in spirituality from many different quarters. And women will continue to live out their religious convictions in whatever ways they feel led, despite the restrictions that male religious leaders may seek to place upon them. As Generation X and the Millennials take their places, a new comfort level of equality between men and women is being established. Just as men and women are more comfortable working side by side in the labor force, so they become more comfortable sharing leadership and working together in their religious communities. Religion will continue to be a significant force in American life and in southern life. Some of its forms and manifestations may change radically. New beliefs and practices will evolve, new groups arrive on the scene. Women will create and lead some of them. The journey will go on.

s Conclusion Carol K. Bleser

T

he perceptive essays in Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective came out of a symposium sponsored by Converse College in March . Theoretically, my task was to use the excellent essays in this volume to do a retrospective of the past century and from them try to predict the future of southern women in the twenty-first century. It could have been a mission-impossible assignment were it not for Professor Melissa Walker, who not only wrote a pivotal essay on rural southern women in the twentieth century, but also organized the conference and selected the distinguished scholars who contributed to it. Her Converse College colleague Professor Joe Dunn, the Charles A. Dana Professor of History and Politics and chairman of the History and Politics Department, shared the responsibility of organizing the symposium and served as its moderator. Professor Dunn contributed a most thorough and insightful introduction to this collection of essays, summarizing briefly for the reader each author’s findings on southern women across the full spectrum of topics—economics, politics, race, civil rights, education, culture, and religion. What emerges from the diversity of all of the contributed works, including Professor Dunn’s summary and his poignant glimpse into his own mother’s life experience in the twentiethcentury South, is a recognition of how relatively unchanging life had been for southern women until the start of the last quarter of the twentieth century—the key word is unchanging—and how rapidly conditions have been changing since then. As a historian of the nineteenth-century South, I had intended to cite some examples from the lives of nineteenth-century southern women to place this collection of essays in a historical perspective. However, after reading these pieces, I realized that I did not need to go back that far in time to

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demonstrate the particularly dramatic changes in the status of women in the southern United States. The fourth quarter of the past century holds the most important clues to impending changes for women in the twenty-first century. Let me first note some of my own experiences, since, to my surprise, I find that my life spans the period in question. Molding southern women’s lives has been a source of great pride at Converse College for more than a century. I should know, for I am very proud to be one of its alumnae. Although many of my classmates in the s were incredibly talented, little had changed for middle-class southern women from the middle of the depression in the mid-s, when Professor Dunn’s mother attended college, to the s when my contemporaries and I were enrolled at Converse. In that intervening period, World War II had occurred; jet planes, television, and air-conditioning had come into being; and Brown v. Board of Education had begun to alter the political and social landscape of the solid South. But as late as , an aging but world-renowned anthropologist lectured an assembly of Converse College women and dictated: women’s place was in the home, tending to the needs of one’s husband, bearing and raising the children, handling all the domestic matters, instilling the family with moral uprightness and religion while the husband bore the burden of seeking a career, supporting the family, and seeing to their economic welfare. I realized much later that this was the separate-sphere ideology that was subscribed to by most members, male and female, of the middle and upper classes in nineteenthcentury America and that was still prevalent in the South in the s, if not the North. Later, in the decade of the s, men walked on the moon, but most Converse women could not walk into the boardrooms of the leading corporations, except as secretaries, nor could they easily enter the professions of law and medicine. When I graduated from Converse College, only several of us went on to graduate school. Today, the number of women, north and south, enrolled in institutions for advanced degrees is far greater than anyone could have predicted in the s. I attended Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Needless to say, I was seen as such an anomaly that the Columbia University History Department was inspired to wonder how long “Miss Magnolia” might last in graduate school at a prominent northern university. At the start of the new millennium, one sees that young southern women are not dropping out to get married and start families in their early twenties; they instead are generally having more educational and professional success

Conclusion

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than ever. Women are now estimated to make up  percent of all students who earn bachelor degrees in the United States. We can expect that these advances will continue to be made for southern women, black and white. However, we must hope that they do not lead to the loss of single-gender private colleges. Professor Amy McCandless’s article in this volume suggests that this might occur in the twenty-first century. In a judicious essay based on solid research, McCandless clearly and informatively lays out the histories of the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute lawsuits to admit women. These legal decisions appear to have great significance, symbolizing the end of single-gender education in public colleges and universities throughout the nation. These cases are of special interest to the South, because the cases cited that struck down the single-gender education at public expense repeatedly referenced earlier suits that found racially segregated institutions unconstitutional. The debate continues into the twentyfirst century over “separate but equal” in higher education. Converse College was significant in the making of my academic career. Later in life, I realized that I had been particularly fortunate to be able to attend a women’s college where I learned to use leadership skills, was encouraged to speak up regularly in class, and had the pleasure of being cherished by an excellent faculty devoted to providing a superior undergraduate education for women. However, after a long teaching career at six separate colleges and universities, both private and public, all coeducational, I did not find similar supportive conditions for undergraduate women. I fear that through the s, coeducational undergraduate institutions shortchanged women students. There are only seventy women’s colleges left in the United States, and I despair that they are on the endangered list. The  funeral of Lillian Kibler is my other personal memory of the way it was. She had been my beloved Converse College history teacher who supported me in my endeavor to pursue a Ph.D. in American history at a time few women sought graduate degrees in history. She insisted that I go to Columbia University, and she insisted that I live in Johnson Hall, the university dormitory for graduate student women. Kibler herself was a graduate of Columbia University’s Ph.D. program in history. She went to study there in the midst of World War II and did admirably well. Her mentor, Professor Allan Nevins, a preeminent American historian and a prolific author, wrote a . National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ), table . . “Women’s College Coalition,” http:/www.womenscolleges.org.

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letter of recommendation for her for a faculty position at Converse College. Nevins noted in his letter that because the male students had all gone into service in World War II, Columbia had to let down its standards and take in women to keep the graduate program alive during wartime. In spite of Nevins’s letter, Converse College hired Kibler, and she served her students well for more than two decades. She became chair of the History Department; wrote a groundbreaking biography of Benjamin F. Perry, a nineteenthcentury South Carolina unionist; and completed the institutional history of Converse College after her retirement. In , she died at her family home in Newberry, South Carolina. Her minister delivered a long eulogy of her life. He noted that although she never married, she was important to her family, her church, her Newberry community, and in her teaching career at the local high school. Nowhere in his talk did he mention that she had left South Carolina to go north to pursue a Ph.D. in American history at Columbia University, had taught college students for more than twenty years at Converse, had inspired a handful of them to pursue further academic studies, and was a scholar of some renown. Lillian Kibler was beloved not only by her family, but also by all the Converse College women she taught over the course of her career. The year again of Kibler’s death was , the place Newberry, South Carolina. Her remarkable contributions to furthering southern women’s educational and professional opportunities went unnoted. Her experiences were emblematic of educated southern women whose accomplishments were rendered invisible. This is the historical context in which our authors are addressing the dramatic changes in the status of southern women in the late twentieth century and in which they are making predictions for their accomplishments in the twenty-first century. My view is that after seventy-five years of stasis, during which groundwork was laid, primarily by the intervention of the federal government in a variety of guises, massive changes have occurred in the South, primarily in the past quarter century. For instance, Melissa Walker, who has done numerous interviews of southern farm women that she has preserved on tape, captures the story of their profound transformation from countryside to urban centers over the twentieth century. She states that in , the average southern woman lived in a rural area: “By , the U.S. Census Bureau classified only  percent of southern women as rural residents. . . . Over the course of the century, thousands of rural families left the land, forcing women to reorder their lives in unfamiliar settings.” Even more specifically targeted to South Carolina and especially upstate South Carolina is a recent study conducted by Jim London, a professor of city and regional

Conclusion

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planning at Clemson University. His findings, reported in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal of February , , state, “South Carolina is now converting land from rural to urban uses at the fourth highest rate in the nation.” That figure is staggering, especially since the land and agrarianism were respected and revered from the earliest arrival of English colonists in the South. With this significant loss of farmland, change is inevitable. Jacqueline Jones expands upon this theme and notes in her essay that “the old Cotton Belt, which defined much of the South’s peculiar demography and politics until well into the s, now is home to diverse industries and services.” At first, those dispossessed from the land suffered overwhelming losses. However, the increasing modernization in the South, especially due to World War II economic and manpower mobilization, hastened the transformation of the South. Women, black and white, found jobs in defense plants. By the s, Jones points out, “women began to make inroads into law, banking, and corporate management.” Because white-collar enterprises were the source of these jobs, southern women who had so recently been confined to labor on the farm and the textile mill could now compete in these new industries. The caveat, however, became that the best-paying jobs went to the well educated, and, at first, most southerners, male and female, did not qualify for these positions given the low levels of schooling in the region. These jobs went to outsiders. However, Jones points out that by the late s, with increasing educational opportunities in the South, women moved into jobs similar to those of their counterparts in other parts of the country, with “ percent of southern white women [holding] white-collar jobs as managers, professionals, technicians, and sales workers, but only onequarter of all black women employees [falling] into that category.” Thus, by the end of the twentieth century, a number of factors—the various interventions of the federal government; the modernizing of industry; the growth of service-based businesses; the move of industry to the South, enabled by the often overlooked advent of air-conditioning; and the flocking of retired people with disposable incomes to the Sun Belt—all taken together have changed forever the status of southern women in the past quarter century. The great strength of this volume is the broad range of themes covered by the individual contributors and the rigorous scholarship undertaken by them to demonstrate the progress of southern women and their influence on so many aspects of the regional culture including politics, religion, civil rights, and society as well as education, economics, and urbanism. What we see, of course, depends mainly on what we are looking for. What I see is contained in a work titled Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women’s Army

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Corps, 1944–1945, edited by Aileen Kilgore Henderson. Her life, which spans more than eight decades, is in many ways a metaphor for much that has been written by the authors in this volume. In the prologue to her book, she recalls: My life was not unusual for someone born in west central Alabama in  in a coal-mining settlement. My father worked as timekeeper in the company office. My mother took care of the house and children (four girls by —Francys, Jane, Aileen, and Mary Alice). My older sisters and I attended the dirt-floored Cedar Cove school. In  we moved to Brookwood, Alabama, realizing the dream of my parents to own a farm, an attractive house with a bathroom (though still no running water), and to have a new, consolidated school to educate their children. My father commuted the six miles to work at Cedar Cove in our Model T Ford. Then came the stock market crash and the subsequent closing of the mines, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression for our family. Eventually my father got work as a roving telegrapher for the Frisco Railroad, the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway Company. He was away from home most of the time, going from depot to depot wherever he was needed. My brother, William, was born in . My parents managed to keep us all in school, buying our textbooks secondhand and working at the school to pay our fees. Along with education, the rural southern Baptist religion was the dominant influence in our lives outside of our home. Drinking alcohol, smoking, playing cards, and going to movies were works of the Devil, and many a sermon was preached against them in church and in summer tent revival meetings. An irony was that none of us had money to buy whiskey or cigarettes, and no transportation to get to a movie house even if we did have the admission fee. In  an uncle gifted us with a radio, a Sears, Roebuck Silvertone with a shining green eye when it was snapped on. I spent hours, sometimes far into the night, listening not only to American stations but to the international shortwave band. I was well aware of the dark events taking shape in Europe. After my graduation from high school in , I worked as a sales clerk at S. H. Kress. The hours were long and the work was hard, but a fascinating world opened to me. Everybody came to the five-and-dime store. I saw boys I had known at school who had joined the army, looking much improved because of their neat uniforms and newly-disciplined life. I waited on people from up north who had come to town to teach in the flight school at the Tuscaloosa airport. After more than five years at Kress, I felt a discontent that my life had not changed along with all these changes around me. I wanted to make sacrifices to help my country, to serve. Nursing school appealed to me, but usually there was a formidable entry fee. . . . Also when I talked about my ambition to others more experienced in worldly ways, they expressed disapproval of nursing as a career for a nice girl. . . .

Conclusion

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Meantime, I gave up my job with Kress and spent a year as a Civil Service employee, becoming more and more aware of women in the military. I knew the WAAC (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps) began in Des Moines not many months after Pearl Harbor and had become so useful it was no longer an auxiliary unit but was now part of the army, the WAC (Women’s Army Corps). I realized becoming a WAC would enable me to make a contribution to the war effort while receiving some financial compensation at the same time. But no woman I knew had joined a branch of the service, and I heard stories told about the WACs that rivaled the nurse stories. I took care not to mention to friends my thoughts about joining until one day on a Tuscaloosa street I met a former boyfriend of my sister Jane’s, home on leave from the Air Corps. I had always thought of him as a person of integrity. Now I asked him what he thought of the Women’s Army Corps. “The WACs I’ve worked with are doing a good job,” he said. “If joining is what you feel is right for you, go ahead.”

She begins her journal on January , . One week from tomorrow I become an enlisted woman in the Women’s Army Corps. I can hardly wait, yet I’m scared to death. Am I getting into something that will transform me into a disgraced monster? My former boss would say “yes.” When I quit my job at Kress, I planned to enter nurse’s training. . . . But on my last work day, the manager came to my counter. Without looking at me he said grimly, “Whatever you do when you leave here, don’t go into nurses’ training.” I was too astonished to speak, and he walked away. My brother-in-law just let me know nursing meant the ruination of a good girl. After that, I lost my nerve. Now what’ve I done? Joined the WACs! Brother-in-law didn’t hear the news till after my swearing in. He said, “After the Army finishes with you, you’ll be qualified for nursing.” What if he’s right? I don’t know anybody who has ever done such a daring thing as I have done.

What follows in her book are her diary and letters home for her twentythree months of service. After her discharge from the army, she returned to Alabama, found farming overwhelming, and enrolled in the University of Alabama under the GI Bill. After graduation, she taught, married, and became a well-known author of children’s books. Aileen Kilgore Henderson’s life spans the twentieth century and into the new millennium. If I were to predict the future, based on the accomplished essays I have read by Joe Dunn, Nancy Hardesty, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Jacque. Henderson, Stateside Soldier (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, ), –. . Ibid., .

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line Jones, Amy Thompson McCandless, Melissa Walker, Sarah WilkersonFreeman, and Barbara A. Woods, and the life of Mrs. Henderson, I would say that by , there will not be a separate southern women’s culture; there will be only an American culture with no significant differences for women, north or south. Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective is an invaluable source for anyone interested in the South, especially southern women’s history, its past and, more important, its future.

s Contributors  .  is the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Distinguished Professor of U.S. History at Clemson University. Bleser, a Converse College graduate, is the author of several books including The Hammonds of Redcliffe () and Tokens of Affections: The Letters of a Planter’s Daughter in the Old South (). She is general series editor of the Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South Series for the University of South Carolina Press and is a past president of the Southern Historical Association. She has also served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and was on the jury for the Lincoln Prize in –. She is the coeditor (with Leslie Gordon) of Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives ().

         .     has advanced degrees in accounting, educational administration, and history. She is the college accountant, personnel director, and coordinator of the Renaissance Scholars program at Spartanburg Methodist College, and she serves as an adjunct instructor of history at Converse College. She has published professional book reviews on a number of topics and has editing experience. As the treasurer of the Southern Association for Women Historians, she draws upon both elements of her professional life.  . , Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of the History and Politics Department at Converse College, has written more than seventy articles on a variety of topics and published three books, Teaching the Vietnam War: Resources and Assessments (), The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-first Century (), and Desk Warrior: Memoirs of a Combat REMF (). He has received numerous teaching awards, including Converse College’s Kathryne Amelia Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Above and Beyond Award, and an Outstanding Teaching in Political 



Contributors

Science citation by the American Political Science Association. He is a threetime South Carolina Governor’s Distinguished Professor and three-time nominee for the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education’s United States Professor of the Year.

            , Professor of Religion at Clemson University, is the author of several scholarly books including All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today (d ed., ) and Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (d ed., ). She is currently completing a manuscript on divine healing in the Holiness and early Pentecostal movements, under contract with Hendrickson Publishers. Hardesty has been the recipient of a Pew Charitable Trust Grant and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship.

  , Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, has written extensively about southern literature and culture. Her book Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 () was awarded the Jules F. Landry Award. She is also the coeditor (with Susan V. Donaldson) of Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (). The author of numerous scholarly articles and essays, Jones serves on the editorial boards of Southern Cultures and the Heath Anthology of American Literature. She is completing manuscripts on “Faulkner’s Masculinities,” “Theory and the Good Old Boys: Manhood and Writing in the Modernist South,” and “Faulkner’s Daughters: Women Writers of the Twentieth-Century South.”

 , Truman Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University, is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books including Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks (), Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (), The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (), American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (), and Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s (). She has received the Bancroft Prize in American history and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. Jones is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Her most recent book is Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States, coauthored with Peter Wood, Elaine Tyler May, Tim Borstelmann, and Vicki Ruiz ().

  , Professor of History and Associate Provost at the College of Charleston, is the author of The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South () and

Contributors



numerous scholarly articles. Past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and past chair of the Town of Mount Pleasant Historical Commission, she is on the editorial board of the South Carolina Historical Magazine and the associate editor for women of the South Carolina Encyclopedia to be published by the University of South Carolina Press. She has been a research fellow at the Institute for Southern Studies.

 , Associate Professor of History at Converse College, is the author of All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941 (), which won the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians. She is also the editor of Country Women Cope with Hard Times a collection of edited oral history interviews (). She has published numerous scholarly articles on the lives of rural southerners in Agricultural History, the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, the Oral History Review, and other academic journals. She is the recipient of the O’Herron Award for Faculty Excellence, the Kathryne Amelia Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a National Mortar Board Award for excellence in advising. She currently serves as executive secretary of the Southern Association for Women Historians.

 -, Associate Professor of History at Arkansas State University, is the author of numerous scholarly articles on women and politics for journals ranging from the Journal of Southern History to the Journal of Women’s History and the North Carolina Historical Review. She has also published chapters in several collections of essays on southern women’s history. She serves on the editorial board for the Arkansas Review and is completing a manuscript on southern women’s twentieth-century political activity.

 .  is Professor of History at South Carolina State University. She is the coeditor (with Vicki L. Crawford and Jacqueline A. Rouse) of Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (). Her essay in that collection, “Modjeska M. Simkins and the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, –,” won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Article Prize. She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles. She has been Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Scholar-inResidence, Humanist-in-Residence at Duke University, and Visiting Scholarin-Residence at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. Woods has also received fellowships from the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina and the Southern Fellowships Fund.

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s Index Abernathy, Judith,  Abernathy, Ralph,  Adams, Deola Mayberry, ,  Adcock, Minnie,  African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), , ,  Agnes Scott College,  Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), , , , –,  Agricultural Extension Service, –,  Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committees,  Agriculture: twentieth-century change, –, – Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), , , ,  Albany Movement,  Allen University,  American Association of University Women (AAUW), –,  Ames, Jessie Daniels, ,  Anderson, Mrs. Sherwood,  Appalachia, , , , – Arkansas Riot. See Elaine, Ark., Massacre Association of Business & Professional Women (BPW), –,  Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), ,  Atkins, Natalie,  Avis, Annie,  Bahai, ,  Baily, Sandra,  Baker, Ella, , ,  Baptists, –, , , , –, –

Bates, Daisy,  Beals, Melba Pattillo,  Bekkelund, Ima Hoppe,  Bennett, Belle Harris,  Bethlehem Houses,  Bethune, Mary McLeod, , , ,  Bethune-Cookman College,  Bevel, Dianne Nash,  Black Power Movement,  Blackwell, Harrison,  Blackwell, LeGrand,  Blackwell, Lurline,  Blackwell, Unita,  Boggs, Hale,  Boggs, Lindy,  Bond, Julian,  Booker, Sallie C.,  BPW. See Association of Business and Professional Women Brenau College,  Brewer, Susan,  Brown, Charlotte Hawkins,  Brown v. Board of Education, , , , –,  Browning, Joan C., , , , –, ,  Bryan, William Jennings, ,  Bryant, Brenda,  Buddhism,  Bunting, Josiah,  Burks, Mary Fair, ,  Burlage, Dorothy Dawson, , –, – ,  Burlage, Robert, – Burn, Harry,  Burroughs, Nannie Rice, ,  Bush, George H. W., –





Index

Bush, George W.,  Bush, Jeb,  Butler, Marion,  Byrd, Harry,  Cagle, Mary Lee Wasson Harris,  Candomble,  Cannon, Katie Geneva,  Can’t Quit You, Baby,  Carawan, Candy,  Caraway, Hattie, , – Caraway, Thaddeus,  Carr, Johnnie,  Carroll, Dovie,  Carroll, Etta, –,  Carter, Jimmy, , – Carter, Mae Bertha,  Carter, Rosalyn,  Cash, Kline,  Cather, Willa, – Catholicism, , , ,  Caulfield, Alice, , ,  Chapin, Sarah Flournoy Moore,  Child labor, –, , – Children’s Defense Fund,  Chopin, Kate, ,  Church of God, , ,  Church of God in Christ,  Church of the Nazarene, – Citadel, , , –, –,  Civil Rights Act of , , , , – Civil Rights Movement, –, – Claflin College, ,  Clark, Septima P., , – Clay, Laura,  Clement, Louise Exum,  Clinton, Hillary, – Clinton, William, – Coal Employment Project,  Collins, Norma,  Colored Farmers Alliance,  Columbia College (S.C.),  Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), , ,  Communist Party, ,  Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA),  Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO),  Converse College, , –, – Cooper, Anna Julia, 

Country Life Commission,  Country Life Movement,  Curry, Constance, , ,  Dance of the Dissident Daughter,  Darden, Ida,  Dash, Julie,  Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR),  Davis, Angela,  Davis, Westmoreland,  DeJournette, Charles,  DeLee, Victoria Way, , , –,  Delta Pride,  Democratic Convention: , ; , ; , – Democratic Party, –, –, – Dessa Rose, – Devine, Annie Robinson Bell,  Dewson, Molly, – Dixiecrat Revolt,  Dodd, Myrtle,  Dorchester Voter’s League,  Doughton, Robert,  Douglas, Ellen,  Durr, Virginia Foster, ,  Eagle, Faye,  Edelman, Marion Wright,  Education Act Amendments of . See Title IX Education, single-gender. See Singlegender education Elaine, Ark., Massacre,  Elizabethton, Tennessee, ,  Elliott, Harriet Wiseman, – Episcopalians, , ,  Equal Employment Opportunity Act,  Equal Pay Act of ,  Equal Rights Amendment, – Ervin, Sam,  Evans, Dolly,  Evers, Medgar,  Evers, Myrlie. See Williams, Myrlie Evers Fain, Sarah Lee,  Fair Labor Standards Act of ,  Faludi, Susan,  Family economy, –, , – Farmer, LaVerne,  Farrow, Mildred, 

Index Faulkner, Shannon, –,  Federal Writers Project,  Fisher, Annie May,  Fisk University, ,  Florida State College,  Forman, James,  Foster, Autherine Lucy,  Freedom Rides,  Freeman, Emma, – Fusion politics, –, – Gaines, Lloyd,  Galleher, Louise,  Garvey, Marcus,  Gastonia, N.C.,  Gender gap, – General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC),  Georgia State College for Women, – Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, – Gingrich, Newt, – Gore, Al, – Goucher College,  Graham, Billy,  Graham, Franklin,  Graham, Frank Porter, –,  Graham, Melissa K.,  Grange, – Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al.,  Gray, Victoria,  Great Depression, , –, , –, , – Great Migration,  Hagood, Margaret, ,  Hamer, Fannie Lou, , –,  Hamilton, Grace, , ,  Harris, Katherine,  Hayden, Sandra Cason “Casey,” – Helm, Lucinda B.,  Helms, Jesse, ,  Henderson, Aileen Kilgore, – Henderson, Helen Timmons,  Herbert, Kimberly,  Heyward, Carter, ,  Higgins, Mary,  Highlander Folk School, – Hill, Johnny,  Hindman, Kentucky Settlement School,  Hinduism, , 



Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), –, – Ho, Chih-Yuan,  Hogan, Joe, –,  “Holiday,” – Holiness Church of Christ, – Hollins College,  Holmes, Hamilton, ,  Home Missionary Society,  Hoover, Herbert,  Hope, Lugenia Burns, , – Horton, Myles,  Houston, Charles Hamilton,  Howard University, ,  Hudson, Dovie,  Hudson, Winson,  Hunter, Fannie McDowell,  Hunter-Gault, Charlayne, ,  Hurston, Zora Neale, , – Independent Order of Saint Luke,  Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),  Irwin, Ruth, ,  Islam, , – Jainism,  Jernigan, C. B., – Johnson, Eddie Bernice,  Johnson, Jennifer,  Johnson, Lyndon,  Jones, Billy Lee, ,  Jones, Peggy Delozier,  Jordan, Barbara, ,  Judaism, , ,  Kearney, Belle, , ,  Keys, Charlotte,  Kibler, Lillian, – Kidd, Sue Monk,  Killers of the Dream, , – Killian, Kathryn,  King, Coretta Scott,  King, Martin Luther, Jr., , ,  Knapp, Seaman,  Knights of Labor,  Ku Klux Klan, ,  Kuykendall, Leota, , ,  “La Belle Zoraide,”  Lafayette, Colia, 

 Lamb, Lou Etta,  Lambuth College,  Landrieu, Mary,  LaPrad, Paul,  Lasseter, Elizabeth, – Lawrence, Myrtle,  Lawson, Mrs. J. O.,  League of Women Voters, –, – Lee, Sheila Jackson,  Lewellyn, Evelyn, – Lewis, John,  Lewis, Nell Battle,  Liberty Bonds,  Lincoln, Blanche,  Lincoln University,  Little Rock Nine, ,  Livingstone, Bob,  Living wage laws,  Long, Huey,  Long Walk Home, The, – Lott, Trent, ,  Lotz, Anne Graham,  Love, Mabel,  Lovetinska, Petra,  Lumbee,  Lumpkin, Daisy,  Lumpkin, Elizabeth, – Lumpkin, Grace, ,  Lumpkin, Katherine Du Pre, – Mace, Emory,  Mace, Nancy, , ,  Mack, John,  Mack, Sylvia,  Making of a Southerner, The, – Manegold, Catherine,  Mankin, Helen Douglas,  Marshall, Thurgood,  Martin, Ed,  Martin, Opal,  Mary Baldwin College, , –, – Massirer, Agnes,  Mayberry, Pauline,  McBrayer, Ruth Hatchette,  McCarthy, Joseph,  McCarthy, Rebecca,  McCauley, Rosa Lee,  McCollum, Matthew,  McDonald, S. J.,  McGavock, David, 

Index McGavock, Willie Elizabeth Harding,  McIntyre, Virginia, – McKenzie, Vashti Murphy,  McKinney, Lester,  McKnight, Alfred,  McKnight, Beatrice Taylor, , , –, ,  McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education,  Mellette, Nancy,  Memphis Furniture Plant, –,  Mentavlos, Jeanie,  Merrick, Caroline E.,  Messer, Kim,  Methodists, , –, , , , – , , , –, –,  Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, –,  Mississippi State University,  Mississippi Teachers’ Association,  Mississippi University et al. v. Hogan, – Mississippi University for Women, – ,  Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri et al., ,  Mitchum, Donie,  Moncure, Thomas,  Monteith, Henri,  Monteith, Rebecca,  Moon, Edmonia, – Moon, Lottie, – Moon, Orianna,  Moore, Joanna B.,  Morrison, Cameron,  Morton, Nelle,  Mound Bayou, Miss.,  Mutual aid, –, –,  Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), , , –, , –, , , –,  National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), ,  National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, 

Index National Council of Negro Women, ,  National Labor Relations Board (NLRB),  National Recovery Administration (NRA),  National Student Association, ,  National Youth Administration (NYA), ,  New Deal, , , –, , , –, ,  Newman, Isaiah DeQuincey, ,  Nineteenth Amendment, , – Nixon, Richard, ,  North Carolina Normal and Industrial College for Women,  North Carolina Teachers Association,  O’Connor, Sandra Day,  “Ole Miss.” See University of Mississippi Orangeburg Movement, ,  Overman, Lee,  Owen, Ruth Bryan, ,  Ozment, Suzanne, ,  Page, Sally Turner, – Paine College,  Palmer, Grace Brooks,  Parker, John,  Parks, A. Lee, Jr.,  Parks, Rosa, , , , –,  Patterson, Dorothy,  Patterson, Paige,  Payne, William,  Pentecostalism, – Peonage, – Pettit, Katherine,  Plessy v. Ferguson, , , ,  Polle, Lillian,  Poll tax, , ,  Populists, – Portch, Stephen R.,  Porter, Katherine Anne, , – Powell, Faye,  Powell, Lewis,  Presbyterians, , , , , ,  Production and Marketing Administration,  Progressive Farmers’ and Household Union,  Progressive Party,  Protestants, , 



Race relations, – Rackley, Gloria Blackwell, , –, ,  Rackley, Jack,  Rackley v. Tri-County Hospital,  Randolph Macon Woman’s College,  Rankin, Dora,  Rankin, Lochie,  Reddings, Terri, – “Red Shirts,”  Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ,  Republican Party, –, , –, – , – Richland County Citizens Committee (RCCC), ,  Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, ,  Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith, ,  Romo, Margerite,  Roosevelt, Eleanor, , , – Roosevelt, Franklin, , , , ,  Roosevelt, Teddy, ,  Rosen, Jeffrey,  Rosenwald Fund,  Ross, Aggie,  Ross, Rose,  Russell, Dan,  Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank,  Santeria,  Sapphira and the Slave Girl, – Scarritt Bible and Training College, ,  Schlafly, Phyllis, , – Scotia Seminary,  Sehested, Nancy Hastings,  Seraph on the Suwannee, – Serling, Steve, –,  Shapiro, Judith,  Sharecroppers Union (SCU), , – Sheeks, Elliot J. Doboe,  Sibley, Mrs. W. C.,  Simcik, Mary, – Simkins, Modjeska Monteith, , ,  Simmons, Althea,  Simmons, Essie,  Simmons, Kate,  Simpson, Theodosia,  Single-gender education, – Sit-ins, , 



Index

Smith, Al,  Smith, Amanda Berry,  Smith, Kemba,  Smith, Lillian, , , – Smith, Ruby Doris. See Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith Smith-Lever Act of , – Smith v. University of Washington,  Social Security, –, –,  Somerville, Nellie Nugent,  South Carolina Citizens Committee (SCCC),  South Carolina Human Relations Council,  South Carolina State University,  Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), –, , – Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), , , –, ,  Southern Conference Educational Fund,  Southern Conference for Human Welfare, ,  Southern Farmer’s Alliance, – Southern Organizing Committee for Educational and Social Justice (SOC),  Southern Regional Council, – Southern Student Human Relations Project,  Southern Student Organizing Committee,  Southern Student Seminar,  Southern Summer School for Women Workers,  Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), , ,  Southern University,  Spelman College,  Spencer, Edna,  Stetson, Charlotte Perkins. See Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Stone, May,  Strobel, James,  Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), , , , ,  Suddarth, Fannie,  Sufism,  Sweatt v. Painter et al., 

Taylor, Johnnie Belle,  Temperance movement. See Women’s Christian Temperance Union Tensley, Rosa,  Terrell, Mary Church, ,  Texas Women’s University, , – Thomas, Clarence,  Thrasher, Sue, , , – Thurmond, Strom, ,  Tillett, Gladys Avery, , –, , – Timmerman, George B., Jr.,  Title VII. See Civil Rights Act of  Title IX, , , ,  Tobacco Workers Organizing Committee,  Truman, Harry,  Tucker, Henry St. George,  Unitarians, , – United Automobile Workers (UAW),  United Furniture Workers Union of America,  U.S. Children’s Bureau,  U.S. Department of Agriculture, –, –,  United States v. Fordice,  United States v. Virginia et al., , ,  United Textile Workers,  Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA),  University of Alabama,  University of Georgia, , ,  University of Mississippi,  University of Missouri, – University of North Carolina,  University of South Carolina,  University of Texas, ,  Urban League, ,  Virginia Institute for Women’s Leadership, –,  Virginia Military Institute, , , –, –, ,  Virginia Young Democrats,  Voice from the South, A,  Voting Rights Act of ,  Voudun,  Wagner Act,  Walker, Maggie Lena,  Warf, Ruth, 

Index Washington, Maggie, ,  Washington, Mary Helen,  Weir, Bernice,  Wells, Ida B., ,  Wesley Community Homes,  White, Lulu Belle Madison,  White, Walter,  White supremacy, – Wicca, ,  Wiggins, Ella May,  Willard, Frances, – Williams, Joyce,  Williams, Myrlie Evers,  Williams, Naomi,  Williams, Sherley Ann, – Wilson, Woodrow,  Winthrop College,  Woman Suffrage Amendment. See Nineteenth Amendment Woman Suffrage Movement, –,  Woman’s Missionary Society,  Women: and economic decision making, –, ; missionaries, –; preachers, –; sharecropping, , , , –, 



Women and work: crafts, –; domestic, –, , –, ; farm, –, , , –; industrial, –, ; migrant, –, , –; mining, ; service, , ; textile, –, – ; tobacco, , , , ; unpaid, , ,  Women’s Army Corps (WACs), – Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), , –, –, , , ,  Women’s College Coalition, – Women’s division, Democratic Party, – Women’s Political Caucus, ,  Woodruf, Delilah, – Woolsey, Louisa,  Works Progress Administration,  World War I, , , – World War II, , , , , –,  Wright, Alice Spearman, – Yoruba,  Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), , , , , , , , 