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Women were leading actors in twentieth-century developments in Georgia, yet most histories minimize their contributions. The essays in the second volume of Georgia Women, edited by Ann Short Chirhart and Kathleen Ann Clark, vividly portray a wide array of Georgia women who played an important role in the state’s history, from little-known Progressive Era activists to famous present-day figures such as Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

Georgia women were instrumental to state and national politics even before they achieved suffrage, and as essays on Lillian Smith, Frances Pauley, Coretta Scott King, and others demonstrate, they played a key role in twentieth-century struggles over civil rights, gender equality, and the proper size and reach of government. Georgia women’s contributions have been wide ranging in the arena of arts and culture and include the works of renowned blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and such nationally prominent literary figures as Margaret Mitchell, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, as well as Walker.

While many of the volume’s essays take a fresh look at relatively well-known figures, readers will also have the opportunity to discover women who were vital to Georgia’s history yet remain relatively obscure today, such as Atlanta educator and activist Lugenia Burns Hope, World War II aviator Hazel Raines, entrepreneur and carpet manufacturer Catherine Evans Whitener, and rural activist and author Vara A. Majette. Collectively, the life stories portrayed in this volume deepen our understanding of the multifaceted history of not only Georgia women but also the state itself.

University of Georgia Press

Southern Women:  Their Lives and Times Ser.

Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives engages current scholarship on women in Texas, the South, and the United States. It provides insights into Texas’s singular geographic position, bordering on the West and sharing a unique history with Mexico, while analyzing the ways in which Texas stories mirror a larger American narrative. 

The biographies and essays illustrate an uncommon diversity among Texas women, reflecting experiences ranging from those of dispossessed enslaved women to wealthy patrons of the arts. That history also captures the ways in which women’s lives reflect both personal autonomy and opportunities to engage in the public sphere. From the vast spaces of northern New Spain and the rural counties of antebellum Texas to the growing urban centers in the post–Civil War era, women balanced traditional gender and racial prescriptions with reform activism, educational enterprise, and economic development.

Contributors to Texas Women address major questions in women’s history, demonstrating how national and regional themes in the scholarship on women are answered or reconceived in Texas. Texas women negotiated significant boundaries raised by gender, race, and class. The writers address the fluid nature of the border with Mexico, the growing importance of federal policies, and the eventual reforms engendered by the civil rights movement. 

From Apaches to astronauts, from pioneers to professionals, from rodeo riders to entrepreneurs, and from Civil War survivors to civil rights activists, the subjects of Texas Women offer important contributions to Texas history, women’s history, and the history of the nation.

Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives

Virginia Women is the first of two volumes exploring the history of Virginia women through the lives of exemplary and remarkable individuals. This collection of seventeen essays, written by established and emerging scholars, recovers the stories and voices of a diverse group of women, from the seventeenth century through the Civil War era. Placing their subjects in their larger historical contexts, the authors show how the experiences of Virginia women varied by race, class, age, and marital status, and also across both space and time.

Some essays examine the lives of well-known women—such as First Lady Dolley Madison—from a new perspective. Others introduce readers to relatively obscure historical figures: the convicted witch Grace Sherwood; the colonial printer Clementina Rind; Harriet Hemings, the enslaved daughter of Thomas Jefferson. Essays on the frontier heroine Mary Draper Ingles and the Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew examine the real women behind the legends. Altogether, the essays in this collection offer readers an engaging and personal window onto the experiences of women in the Old Dominion.

Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books

Virginia Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 1

Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times introduces a history as dynamic and diverse as Kentucky itself. Covering the Appalachian region in the east to the Pennyroyal in the west, the essays highlight women whose aspirations, innovations, activism, and creativity illustrate Kentucky’s role in political and social reform, education, health care, the arts, and cultural development. The collection features women with well-known names as well as those whose lives and work deserve greater attention.

Shawnee chief Nonhelema Hokolesqua, western Kentucky slave Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, the sisters Emilie Todd Helm and Mary Todd Lincoln, reformers Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and Laura Clay, activists Anne McCarty Braden and Elizabeth Fouse, politicians Georgia Davis Powers and Martha Layne Collins, sculptor Enid Yandell, writer Harriette Simpson Arnow, and entrepreneur Nancy Newsom Mahaffey are covered in Kentucky Women, representing a broad cross section of those who forged Kentucky’s relationship with the American South and the nation at large.

With essays on frontier life, gender inequality in marriage and divorce, medical advances, family strife, racial challenges and triumphs, widowhood, agrarian culture, urban experiences, educational theory and fieldwork, visual art, literature, and fame, the contributors have shaped a history of Kentucky that is both grounded and groundbreaking.

Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times

By the twentieth century, North Carolina’s progressive streak had strengthened, thanks in large part to a growing number of women who engaged in and influenced state and national policies and politics. These women included Gertrude Weil who fought tirelessly for the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to women, and founded the state chapter of the League of Women Voters once the amendment was ratified in 1920. 

Gladys Avery Tillett, an ardent Democrat and supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal, became a major presence in her party at both the state and national levels. Guion Griffis Johnson turned to volunteer work in the postwar years, becoming one of the state's most prominent female civic leaders. Through her excellent education, keen legal mind, and family prominence, Susie Sharp in 1949 became the first woman judge in North Carolina and in 1974 the first woman in the nation to be elected and serve as chief justice of a state supreme court. Throughout her life, the Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray charted a religious, literary, and political path to racial reconciliation on both a national stage and in North Carolina.

This is the second of two volumes that together explore the diverse and changing patterns of North Carolina women's lives. The essays in this volume cover the period beginning with women born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but who made their greatest contributions to the social, political, cultural, legal, and economic life of the state during the late progressive era through the late twentieth century.

North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

The second volume of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times contains sixteen essays on Tennessee women in the forefront of the political, economic, and cultural history of the state and assesses the national and sometimes international scope of their influence. The essays examine women’s lives in the broad sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth century history in Tennessee and re-envision the state’s past by placing them at the center of the historical stage and examining their experiences in relation to significant events. Together, volumes 1 and 2 cover women’s activities from the early 1700s to the late 1900s.

Volume 2 looks at antebellum issues of gender, race, and class; the impact of the Civil War on women’s lives; parades and public celebrations as venues for displaying and challenging gender ideals; female activism on racial and gender issues; the impact of state legislation on marital rights; and the place of women in particular religious organizations. Together these essays reorient our views of women as agents of change in Tennessee history.

Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, volume 2, highlights the significant historical contributions of some of Louisiana’s most noteworthy and also overlooked women from the eighteenth century to the present. This volume underscores the cultural, social, and political distinctiveness of the state as well as showcases the actions and activities of women who greatly affected the history of Louisiana in profound and interesting ways.

These essays on women at the forefront of Louisiana and national events include information about Sarah Morgan; Janet Mary Riley; Lindy Claiborne Boggs; Lucy Alston Pirrie; Appoline Patout, Mary Ann Patout, and Ida Patout Burns; Lulu White; Neda Jurisich, Eva Vujnovich, and Mary Jane Munsterman Tesvich; Carmelite “Cammie” Garrett Henry; Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Coralie Guarino Davis; Lucinda Williams; Rebecca Wells; Phoebe Bryant Hunter; Cora Allen; Sarah Towles Reed; and Georgia M. Johnson

Contributors: Janet Allured on Janet Mary Riley; Court Carney on Lucinda Williams; Emily Clark on the women from Congo Square in New Orleans; Brittney Cooper on Cora Allen; Mark J. Duvall on Phoebe Bryant Hunter; Lucy Gutman with Shannon Frystack on Carmelite “Cammie” Garrett Henry; Emily Epstein Landau on Lulu White; Hellen S. Lee on Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Leslie Gale Parr on Sarah Towles Reed; Giselle Roberts on Sarah Morgan; Lee Sartain on Georgia M. Johnson; Sara Brooks Sundberg on Lucy Alston Pirrie; Tania Tetlow on Lindy Claiborne Boggs; Susan Tucker on Coralie Guarino Davis; Michael Wade on Appoline Patout, Mary Ann Patout, and Ida Patout Burns; Carolyn E. Ware on Neda Jurisich, Eva Vujnovich, and Mary Jane Munsterman Tesvich; Beth Willinger on the New Orleans Christian Woman’s Exchange; Mary Ann Wilson on Rebecca Wells

Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

This second of two volumes continues the exploration of the history of Virginia women through the lives of exemplary and remarkable individuals. Seventeen essays written by established and emerging scholars recover the stories and voices of a diverse group of women, from the transition from slavery to freedom in the period following the Civil War through the struggle to secure rights for gay and lesbian women in the late twentieth century. Placing their subjects in their larger historical contexts, the authors show how the experiences of Virginia women varied by race, class, age, and marital status, and also across both space and time.

Some essays examine the lives of well-known women—such as Ellen Glasgow and Patsy Cline—from a new perspective. Others introduce readers to historical figures who are less familiar: freedmen schoolteacher Caroline Putnam; reformer Orra Gray Langhorne; Sadie Heath Cabaniss, the founder of professional nursing in Virginia; and Marie Kimball, an early preservationist. Essays on cotton textile workers in the late nineteenth century and home demonstration agents in the early twentieth examine women’s collective experiences in these important areas. Altogether, the essays in this collection offer readers an engaging and personal window into the experiences of women in the Old Dominion.

Virginia Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

Another addition to the Southern Women series, Alabama Women celebrates women’s histories in the Yellowhammer State by highlighting the lives and contributions of women and enriching our understanding of the past and present. Exploring such subjects as politics, arts, and civic organizations, this collection of eighteen biographical essays provides a window into the social, cultural, and geographic milieux of women’s lives in Alabama.

Featured individuals include Augusta Evans Wilson, Maria Fearing, Julia S. Tutwiler, Margaret Murray Washington, Pattie Ruffner Jacobs, Ida E. Brandon Mathis, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Sara Martin Mayfield, Bess Bolden Walcott, Virginia Foster Durr, Rosa Parks, Lurleen Burns Wallace, Margaret Charles Smith, and Harper Lee.

Contributors:

-Nancy Grisham Anderson on Harper Lee

-Harriet E. Amos Doss on the enslaved women surgical patients of J. Marion Sims

-Wayne Flynt and Marlene Hunt Rikard on Pattie Ruffner Jacobs

-Caroline Gebhard on Bess Bolden Walcott

-Staci Simon Glover on the immigrant women in metropolitan Birmingham

-Sharony Green on the Townsend Family

-Sheena Harris on Margaret Murray Washington

-Christopher D. Haveman on the women of the Creek Removal Era

-Kimberly D. Hill on Maria Fearing

-Tina Naremore Jones on Ruby Pickens Tartt

-Jenny M. Luke on Margaret Charles Smith

-Rebecca Cawood McIntyre on Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and Sara Martin Mayfield

-Rebecca S. Montgomery on Ida E. Brandon Mathis

-Paul M. Pruitt Jr. on Julia S. Tutwiler

-Susan E. Reynolds on Augusta Evans Wilson

-Patricia Sullivan on Virginia Foster Durr

-Jeanne Theoharis on Rosa Parks

-Susan Youngblood Ashmore on Lurleen Burns Wallace

Alabama Women: Their Lives and Times

Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived.

Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage.

Contributors:

Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis

Gary T. Edwards on Amanda Trulock

Dianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher Terry

Sarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie Caraway

Rebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil War

Elizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gatson Bates

Kelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton Frontier

John Kirk on Sue Cowan Morris

Marianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert Cornish

Rachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia Parler

Loretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark

Michael Pierce on Freda Hogan

Debra A. Reid on Mary L. Ray

Yulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby Jones

Sonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas