Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, Volume 2

by Elizabeth Anne Payne, Martha H. Swain, Marjorie Julian Spruill, Michael B. Ballard, Nancy Bercaw

Overview

Volume 1 of Mississippi Women enriched our understanding of women’s roles in the state’s history through profiles of notable, though often neglected, individuals. Volume 2 explores the historical forces that have shaped women’s lives in Mississippi. Covering an expanse of time from early European settlement through the course of the twentieth century, the essays in the second volume acknowledge the state’s diverse cultural and physical landscapes as they discuss how issues of race, gender, and class affected women’s lives in various private and public spheres.

Essays on the state’s early history focus on such topics as Choctaw and Chickasaw women’s influence on Native American society and tribal councils, daily life for free black women in slaveholding Natchez, and the efforts of white Protestant women to establish churches on the frontier. Several essays cast new light on legal concerns, including two on the pivotal Married Women’s Property Act of 1839, while other essays examine the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on women’s lives.

The boundaries of race and gender in Jim Crow Mississippi are explored through an essay on the women of the mixed-race Knight family, notably the educator, nurse, and missionary Anna Knight. Women’s experiences with rural electrification, consumerism, civil rights activism, social and service clubs, and feminism are among the other twentieth-century topics addressed in the essays. Volume 2 concludes with an essay on storytelling and remembrance that centers on the family of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (and Mississippi native) William Raspberry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820333946
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	02/01/2010
Series:	Southern Women: Their Lives and Times Series , #7
Edition description:	Volume 2
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

MICHAEL B. BALLARD (1946–2016) was the university archivist at the Mitchell Memorial Library of Mississippi State University. His books include Landscapes of Battle: The Civil War; Pemberton: A Biography; A Mississippi Rebel in the Army of Northern Virginia: The Memoirs of Private David Holt; and Civil War Mississippi: A Guide.

JOYCE LINDA BROUSSARD is a professor of U.S. southern and women’s history at California State University Northridge. She served as codirector of the Natchez Courthouse Records Project, which included among its activities the biennial Historic Natchez Conferences. Broussard has published in the field of gender and women’s history, including essays in support of an educator’s website for PBS documentaries dealing with slavery, the Supreme Court, and the history of Jim Crow and racism in America.

KAREN L. COX is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her books include Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture; Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South; and Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture.

EMILYE CROSBY is a professor of history at the State University of New York at Geneseo. She is the author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi.

RANDY J. SPARKS is a professor of history at Tulane University. His books include The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey, Religion in Mississippi, and several coedited volumes on the history of the Atlantic World.

Elizabeth Anne Payne (Editor)
ELIZABETH ANNE PAYNE is a professor of history at the University of Mississippi.

Martha H. Swain (Editor)
MARTHA H. SWAIN is Cornaro Professor of History Emerita at Texas Woman's University.

Marjorie Julian Spruill (Editor)
MARJORIE JULIAN SPRUILL is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Elizabeth Anne Payne xi

Part 1 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Elizabeth Anne Payne 1

Choctaw and Chickasaw Women, 1690-1834 James Taylor Carson 7

Stepping Lively in Place The Free Black Women of Antebellum Natchez Joyce L. Broussard 23

The Good Sisters White Protestant Women and Institution Building in Antebellum Mississippi Randy J. Sparks 39

Naked before the Law Married Women and the Servant Ideal in Antebellum Natchez Joyce L. Broussard 57

Cautious, Conservative, and Raced The Maternal Presumption in Mississippi Child Custody Law, 1830-1920 Kevin D. Mccarthy 77

Yankees in the Yard Mississippi Women during the Vicksburg Campaign Michael B. Ballard 97

The Gendered Construction of Free Labor in the Civil War Delta Nancy Bercaw 113

Hearth and Home Constructing Domesticity in Mississippi, 1830-1920 Susan Ditto 128

Part 2 The Twentieth Century Elizabeth Anne Payne Martha H. Swain 149

Mississippi's United Daughters of the Confederacy Benevolence, Beauvoir, and the Transmission of Confederate Culture, 1897-1919 Karen L. Cox 155

Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi The Women of the Knight Family Victoria E. Bynum 174

"Down in Tupelo Everybody Seems to Be Feeling Grand" Early Home Electrification Promotion in Northeast Mississippi Sara E. Morris 192

Gladys Presley, Dorothy Dickins, and the Limits of Female Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century Mississippi Ted Ownby 211

"The Lady Folk Is a Doer" Women and the Civil Rights Movement in Claiborne County, Mississippi Emilye Crosby 234

Discovering What's Already There Mississippi Women and Civil Rights Movements J. Todd Moye 249

In the Mainstream Mississippi White Women's Clubs in the Quest for Women's Rights in the Twentieth Century Martha H. Swain 269

The Mississippi "Takeover" Feminists, Antifeminists, and the International Women's Year Conference of 1977 Marjorie Julian Spruill 287

The Unknown Grandmother, African American Memory, and Lives of Service in Northern Mississippi Elizabeth Anne Payne Hattye Raspberry-Hall Michael de L. Landon Jennifer Nardone 313

Selected Bibliography Brenda M. Eagles 333

Contributors 345

Index 349

Editorial Reviews

Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives—Volume 2 includes vibrant chapters from a number of prominent scholars in the field of southern history as well as from those who are just bringing their work to light. With this second book, a smart complement to the first volume, the authors analyze the forces of history in the lives of Mississippi women while demonstrating women's agency in a sophisticated and analytical manner. From Choctaw and Chickasaw tribal history to the International Women's Year Conferences of 1977, Mississippi offers a fascinating window into the world of southern women.

author of Women and Gender in the New South, 1865–1945 - Elizabeth Hayes Turner

This volume is for all of us. Beautiful and powerful writing makes these essays accessible to those of us outside the scholarly world of historians and the academy. As a former civil rights lawyer, law professor, and Women’s Rights Program Officer at Ford responsible for its grant-making globally and in the United States, I cannot say enough about how important this volume is.

Former Ford Foundation Program Officer for Women's Rights and Gender Equity - Barbara Y. Phillips

The essays in this volume confound our assumptions about Mississippi women and broaden our understanding of southern womanhood in general. The authors capture the breadth and diversity of women’s experiences in the state from eighteenth-century Chickasaw and Choctaw women to nineteenth- and twentieth-century black and white women—all restricted by or challenging social, economic, and political constraints. This is an outstanding study of women’s history as southern history.

editor of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times - Beverly Greene Bond

I can't wait to assign the second volume of Mississippi Women to my classes. This book provides historical scholarship that can at once illuminate stories and novels by writers like Eudora Welty and Toni Morrison and offer new insight into literary texts by their male counterparts. The book's essays paint a portrait of Mississippi women—Native American, black, and white—which is relevant far beyond state lines or the boundaries of academic disciplines.

author of Eudora Welty: A Biography - Suzanne Marrs

The well-written and accessible essays in this volume add depth and rich texture to our understanding of the lives of women in Mississippi.

Journal of Southern History

"Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives—Volume 2 includes vibrant chapters from a number of prominent scholars in the field of southern history as well as from those who are just bringing their work to light. With this second book, a smart complement to the first volume, the authors analyze the forces of history in the lives of Mississippi women while demonstrating women's agency in a sophisticated and analytical manner. From Choctaw and Chickasaw tribal history to the International Women's Year Conferences of 1977, Mississippi offers a fascinating window into the world of southern women."—Elizabeth Hayes Turner, author of Women and Gender in the New South, 1865–1945

"The essays in this volume confound our assumptions about Mississippi women and broaden our understanding of southern womanhood in general. The authors capture the breadth and diversity of women’s experiences in the state from eighteenth-century Chickasaw and Choctaw women to nineteenth- and twentieth-century black and white women—all restricted by or challenging social, economic, and political constraints. This is an outstanding study of women’s history as southern history."—Beverly Greene Bond, editor of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times

"I can't wait to assign the second volume of Mississippi Women to my classes. This book provides historical scholarship that can at once illuminate stories and novels by writers like Eudora Welty and Toni Morrison and offer new insight into literary texts by their male counterparts. The book's essays paint a portrait of Mississippi women—Native American, black, and white—which is relevant far beyond state lines or the boundaries of academic disciplines."—Suzanne Marrs, author of Eudora Welty: A Biography

"This volume is for all of us. Beautiful and powerful writing makes these essays accessible to those of us outside the scholarly world of historians and the academy. As a former civil rights lawyer, law professor, and Women’s Rights Program Officer at Ford responsible for its grant-making globally and in the United States, I cannot say enough about how important this volume is."—Barbara Y. Phillips, Former Ford Foundation Program Officer for Women’s Rights and Gender Equity

"The well-written and accessible essays in this volume add depth and rich texture to our understanding of the lives of women in Mississippi."--Journal of Southern History

From the Publisher