Women Shaping the South pptx

Women Shaping the South

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Southern Women

A series of books developed from the Southern

Conference on Women’s History sponsored by

the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Series Editors

Betty Brandon

Michele Gillespie

Nancy A. Hewitt

Lu Ann Jones

Wilma King

Amy McCandless

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Women Shaping the South

Edited by

Angela Boswell and Judith N. McArthur

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Creating and Confronting Change

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Copyright © 2006 by

The Curators of the University of Missouri

University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201

Printed and bound in the United States of America

All rights reserved

5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Southern Conference on Women’s History (6th : 2003 : Athens, Ga.)

Women shaping the south : creating and confronting change /

edited by Angela Boswell and Judith N. McArthur.

p. cm. — (Southern women)

Summary: “Expanded from papers presented at the Sixth Southern

Conference on Women’s History, this collection demonstrates how

women of different races and classes transformed the South during

its most crucial turning points, including post-Revolution, Civil

War, Jim Crow era, World War I, and the civil rights movement”—

Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1617-5 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8262-1617-X (alk. paper)

1. Women—Southern States—History—Congresses. 2. Southern

States—History—Congresses. I. Boswell, Angela, 1965– II. McArthur,

Judith N. III. Title. IV. Series.

HQ1438.S62S68 2003

305.40975—dc22 2005028189

™ This paper meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper

for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Jennifer Cropp

Typesetter: Phoenix Type, Inc.

Printer and binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

Typefaces: Berkeley and Bickley

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vii

Contents

Editors’ Introduction 1

Gentry Women and the Transformation of

Daily Life in Jeffersonian and Antebellum Virginia

Phillip Hamilton 7

Jane C. Washington, Family, and

Nation at Mount Vernon, 1830–1855

Jean B. Lee 30

“I Desire to Give My Black Family Their Freedom”

Manumissions, Inheritance, and Visions

of Family in Antebellum Kentucky

Yvonne M. Pitts 50

Seeking a Moral Economy of War

Confederate Women and Southern

Nationalism in Civil War North Carolina

Jacqueline Glass Campbell 74

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Redirecting the Tide of White Imperialism

The Impact of Ida B. Wells’s Transatlantic Antilynching

Campaign on British Conceptions of American Race Relations

Sarah L. Silkey 97

Unlikely Allies

Southern Women, Interracial Cooperation, and

the Making of Segregation in Virginia, 1910–1920

Clayton McClure Brooks 120

Solving the Girl Problem

Race, Womanhood, and Leisure in Atlanta during World War I

Sarah Mercer Judson 152

To See Past the Differences to the Fundamentals

Racial Coalition within the League of

Women Voters of St. Louis, 1920–1946

Priscilla A. Dowden-White 174

Louise Thompson Patterson and the

Southern Roots of the Popular Front

Claire Nee Nelson 204

Women’s and Girls’ Activism in 1960s Southwest Georgia

Rethinking History and Historiography

Alisa Y. Harrison 229

About the Editors and Contributors 259

Index 261

viii Contents

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Women Shaping the South

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1

Editors’ Introduction

At the Sixth Southern Conference on Women’s History in Athens, Georgia,

in June 2003, the depth and breadth of the research presented was impres￾sive.1 As we assembled the very best of the expanded conference papers,

representing the cutting edge of scholarship on southern women’s history,

we were inspired by a story from the front lines rather than the archives, a

contemporary drama of African American labor union women creating and

confronting change in the Mississippi Delta. Sarah White of Local 1529,

United Food and Commercial Workers, mesmerized attendees at the confer￾ence’s closing plenary session with a firsthand account of the union’s 1990

strike against the Delta Pride catfish processing co-op. In the Mississippi

Delta, commercial catfish farming has replaced cotton culture, but although

the “crop” is different, it is still harvested and processed by black laborers

for powerful white landowners. The region’s economic transformation has

1. Selected papers from the previous Southern Conferences on Women’s History,

sponsored by the Southern Association for Women Historians, were published by the

University of Missouri Press in the following volumes: 1988 meeting, Southern Women:

Histories and Identities, ed. Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,

and Theda Purdue (1992); 1991 meeting, Hidden Histories of Women in the New South, ed.

Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Theda Perdue, and Elizabeth

H. Turner (1994); 1994 meeting, Beyond Image and Convention: Explorations in Southern

Women’s History, ed. Janet L. Coryell, Martha H. Swain, Sandra Gioia Treadway, and Eliza￾beth Hayes Turner (1998); 1997 meeting, Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood:

Dealing with the Powers That Be, ed. Janet L. Coryell, Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Anastatia

Sims, and Sandra Gioia Treadway (2000); 2000 meeting, Searching for Their Places: Women

in the South across Four Centuries, ed. Thomas H. Appleton Jr. and Angela Boswell (2003).

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changed, without improving, African American women’s work lives: assembly￾line jobs skinning and gutting catfish under the scrutiny of white supervisors

with stopwatches have replaced field labor under white overseers. The tipping

point toward the Delta Pride strike was not the bare subsistence wage but

management’s refusal to allow minimal bathroom breaks and the indignity

of having to seek grudging permission from the processing line supervisor to

use the restroom. When scab workers proved too slow to skin twelve catfish

a minute for eight to ten hours a day, the company was forced to concede to

some of the union’s demands.

The major events of southern history have often been recounted from the

top down, relying upon political and economic models to explain historical

changes, and thus the actors have been men who dominated politics, shaped

economic development, and led armies. As Sarah White’s Local 1529 demon￾strates, however, history is also made from the bottom up by women who

confront change and shape it through their actions. The essays in this volume

use the tools of social history to examine some of the major transformative

events of southern history from the Revolutionary War years to the Civil

Rights era. Shifting the focus to the local level, the authors demonstrate how

women participated in creating change, even as they often confronted con￾ditions over which they had little power. In addition to exploring southern

women’s lives, this collection as a whole reflects how women shaped south￾ern history.

Philip Hamilton addresses the long-term impact of the Revolutionary War

on Virginia women’s roles. The proliferation of political offices following

American independence led to an increased number of elite women running

plantations and households while their husbands were absent. A drop in the

price of tobacco forced agricultural changes that affected women’s work rou￾tines, and westward migration strained familial ties. Although these Virginia

women had not created the changes they confronted, their reactions to the

social, economic, and political transformation of Virginia shaped the new soci￾ety that emerged. Many elite women made the decision to engage in more

diversified agriculture, but when they implemented their plans, including

rearranging the use of their slave labor forces, they found themselves forced

to work harder. Women, who particularly valued family attachments, guided

the re-creation of community ties in newly settled areas. While a woman

might confront the postrevolutionary changes with resentment or even with

a sense of failure, Hamilton shows that they created new lives for them￾selves and their families.

2 Women Shaping the South

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Introduction 3

The postrevolutionary period also created a new country, a republican

experiment in which all men were created equal. Women, although gram￾matically and conceptually precluded from overt political participation as

voters or officeholders, nevertheless participated in defining the memory

and meaning of the new nation. Jean B. Lee describes how Jane C. Washing￾ton worked to preserve Mount Vernon and make it available to the people of

a new nation in search of tangible expressions of national pride. When Wash￾ington inherited Mount Vernon in 1832, she negotiated the competing claims

of providing as well as possible for her children and accommodating the

many Americans who wanted access to the hallowed ground of their found￾ing father. Jane Washington “accorded legitimacy to people’s insistence upon

access, in ways that her predecessors had not.” She also established what

would later become basic protocol for visiting historic homes. While she was

unable in her lifetime to guarantee a permanent transfer of the property from

private estate to public use, she validated citizens’ insistence upon its public

nature. This claim eventually led to the creation of the Mount Vernon Ladies

Association that bought the home for its historic value.

One of the most important transformations in southern history was the

development of the social, cultural, and legal contours of antebellum slavery.

Yvonne M. Pitts offers a unique look at the ways that some women, both

slave and free, confronted the proliferating legal strictures of slavery. White

women in antebellum Kentucky who used their wills to manumit their slaves

challenged social expectations when they placed slaves’ rights to their own

personhood above white families’ property rights. That the Kentucky Court of

Appeals found no legal grounds on which to overturn such wills, despite the

fact that relatives and local courts both found such women to be insane, cre￾ated important legal precedent. Slave women’s attempts to shape the very real

physical and legal strictures of slavery also appear in antebellum Kentucky’s

testamentary cases. Confronting a society and an institution that denied them

the right to refuse their masters sexual access, some slave women used their

positions as coerced mistresses to negotiate manumission. Suits upholding

the wishes of masters who freed their mistresses (or perceived mistresses) in

their wills were much less successful at the state-court level, but Pitts demon￾strates that these slave women’s tenacity did play a role in shaping law.

Historians often view the South’s loss of the Civil War as the defining

moment in its history, and many have focused on southern women’s reactions

to and participation in the Confederacy’s unsuccessful struggle for indepen￾dence. Jacqueline Glass Campbell focuses on Sherman’s march through North

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Carolina to examine the ways women confronted the changes of the Civil

War, particularly the massive destruction caused by the armies. Campbell

agrees that women suffered widespread anger and frustration during the war

and that their resentment sometimes found expression in criticism of the Con￾federacy itself; however, Sherman’s scorched-earth policy incited outrage that

reinforced women’s loyalty to the Confederate cause and lasted for years after

the end of hostilities. The growth of Confederate nationalism among women,

especially near the end of the war, would have long-term consequences, in￾cluding fostering women’s role in the creation of Lost Cause ideology.

The demise of slavery following the Civil War forced southerners to es￾tablish new social relationships between the races. Despite a somewhat

promising start in race relations, white insistence upon formalized inequalities

marked southern history for the rest of the nineteenth century and much of

the twentieth. The next six essays examine how black and white southern

women confronted racism and created the new society in which they lived

side by side.

At the end of the nineteenth century, white southerners brutally reinforced

the socially constructed inequalities through a proliferation of extralegal

violence and lynching. At literal risk to her life, Ida B. Wells confronted this

practice and called attention to its fallacious justification—that white men

lynched black men to protect white women from rape. Sarah L. Silkey con￾tributes a new chapter in Wells’s story as she demonstrates one of the tactics

that Wells used to turn public opinion against the practice of lynching. In

1893 and 1894, Wells traveled to Britain, where by effectively utilizing speak￾ing engagements, elite social connections, and the press, she publicized the

viciousness of lynching and the true reasons behind the practice. Her tremen￾dous impact on the British press’s analysis of lynching affected American

opinion on the subject in both subtle and specific ways.

In the twentieth century another social and increasingly legal means of

repressing African Americans was implemented: formal racial separation, or

Jim Crow. Clayton McClure Brooks examines how white and black women

confronted segregation in Virginia between 1910 and 1920. Black women

identified segregation as an unfair system within which they had to work to

secure the best social and human services possible for their communities.

White women saw in segregation a natural division of the races, albeit one

in which inferiors had some claim on their superiors. White and black women

in Virginia, despite their vastly different vantage points, created an arena in

which they could work together to provide and improve social services for

African Americans.

4 Women Shaping the South

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