front cover of Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood
Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood
Dealing with the Powers That Be
Edited & Intro by Janet L. Coryell, Thomas Appleton, Anastatia Sims, & Sandra Treadway
University of Missouri Press, 2000

In a time when most Americans never questioned the premise that women should be subordinate to men, and in a place where only white men enjoyed fully the rights and privileges of citizenship, many women learned how to negotiate societal boundaries and to claim a share of power for themselves in a male-dominated world.

Covering the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood describes the ways southern women found to advance their development and independence and establish their own identities in the context of a society that restricted their opportunities and personal freedom.

They confronted, cooperated with, and sometimes were co-opted by existing powers: the white and African American elite whose status was determined by wealth, family name, gender, race, skin color, or combinations thereof. Some women took action against established powers and, in so doing, strengthened their own communities; some bowed to the powers and went along to get along; some became the powers, using status to ensure their prosperity as well as their survival. All chose their actions based on the time and place in which they lived.

In these thought-provoking essays, the authors illustrate the complex intersections of race, class, and gender as they examine the ways in which southern women dealt with "the powers that be" and, in some instances, became those powers. Elitism, status, and class were always filtered through a prism of race and gender in the South, and women of both races played an important role in maintaining as well as challenging the hierarchies that existed.

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front cover of Searching for Their Places
Searching for Their Places
Women in the South across Four Centuries
Edited by Thomas H. Appleton, Jr. & Angela Boswell
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Searching for Their Places is a collection inspired by the Fifth Southern Conference on Women’s History. The essays in this volume are particularly astute in assessing how southern women, in the course of “searching for their places,” have individually or collectively sought to empower themselves. The essays, written by outstanding historians in this field, represent some of the freshest and most exciting scholarship about women in the South. They convincingly illustrate how the national experience looks different when southern women become the focus.
The essayists use extensive analyses of primary source materials to examine a variety of issues that have confronted women in the South from the days of English colonization through the civil rights struggles of the post–World War II era. The collection is well balanced in its periodization, with one essay on the seventeenth century, four on the antebellum years, one on the Civil War, three on the immediate postbellum era, and four based in the twentieth century.
Studying women of different colors, backgrounds, and stations across the region and across four centuries, Searching for Their Places will appeal to historians, the general reader, and anyone interested in women’s studies.
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