North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

by Michele Gillespie (Editor), Sally G. McMillen (Editor), Ann Short Chirhart (Contribution by), Emily Wilson (Contribution by), M. Anna Fariello (Contribution by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820347561
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	07/01/2015
Series:	Southern Women: Their Lives and Times Series , #14
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	424
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Michele Gillespie (Editor)
MICHELE GILLESPIE is a professor of history and dean of the undergraduate college at Wake Forest University. She is also author of Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789–1860 (Georgia) and co-editor of ten books, including North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times (Georgia).

Sally G. McMillen (Editor)
SALLY G. McMILLEN is the Mary Reynolds Babcock Professor of History at Davidson College. She is the author of Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing; Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South; To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865–1915; and Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement.


ANN SHORT CHIRHART is an assistant professor of history at Indiana State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction Michele Gillespie Sally G. McMillen 1

The Edenton Ladies: Women, Tea, and Politics in Revolutionary North Carolina Cynthia A. Kierner 12

Sister Anna: An African Woman in Early North Carolina Jon Sensbach 34

Elizabeth Maxwell Steele: "A Great Politician" and the Revolution in the Southern Backcountry Cory Joe Stewart 54

Rose O'Neal Greenhow: "Bearer of Dispatches to the Confederate Government" Sheila R. Phipps 73

Catherine Devereux Edmondston: "My lines are cast in such pleasant places" Suzanne Cooper Guasco 94

Harriet and Louisa Jacobs: "Not without My Daughter" Jim Downs 117

Cornelia Phillips Spencer: The Foremost Daughter of North Carolina and the Contradictions of a Nineteenth-Century Public Life William A. Link 133

Alice Morgan Person: "My life has been out of the ordinary run of woman's life" Angela Robbins 152

Mary Bayard Clarke: Design for "Upsetting the Established Order of Our Dear Old Conservative State" Terrell Armistead Crow 174

Anna Julia Cooper: Black Feminist Scholar, Educator, and Activist Vivian M. May 192

Sallie Southall Cotton: Organized Womanhood Comes to North Carolina Margaret Supplee Smith 213

Annie Lowrie Alexander: "A Woman Doing a Great Work in a Womanly Way" James Douglas Alsop 241

Sarah Cowan "Daisy" Denson: The Lost Matriarch of State Public Welfare Reform Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman 263

Sarah Dudley Pettey: "A New Age Woman" and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender in North Carolina Elizabeth Lundeen 291

Mary Martin Sloop: Mountain Miracle Worker John C. Inscoe 313

Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds: The Public Lives of Progressive North Carolina's Wealthiest Women Michele Gillespie 337

Arizona Nick Swaney Blankenship: Becoming Cherokee Sarah H. Hill 359

Samantha Biddix Bumgarner: Country Music Pioneer Robert Hunt Ferguson 383

Contributors 397

Index 401

Editorial Reviews

The editors...succeed in weaving a ‘larger story of women in the South’ through the lives of these selected individuals

The Journal of Southern Literature - Jae Turner

This volume is a welcome addition to the scholarship on North Carolina women. Thanks to the book’s careful documentation, high school and college students could use one of the pieces as a springboard for further research on a particular woman or topic. Any of the essays would be an excellent choice for college course readings. The fluid writing and interesting subject matter make this volume a very pleasurable read.

North Carolina Historical Review - Elizabeth Bramm Dunn

The stories in this wonderful addition to the Southern Women: Their Lives and Times series are a pleasure to read and contemplate. The diversity of women featured has much to teach us about North Carolina history, as well as about the larger story of women in the South and, indeed, the nation.

coeditor, South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times - Joan Marie Johnson

From colonial patriots and slave resisters to Progressive Era reformers and self-made women, this excellent collection of essays challenges the reader to recognize the remarkable contributions and sustaining histories of black, white, and Native American women in the Tar Heel State.

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

Once you have read the stories of these amazing women, you will never see southern history in quite the same way again. This sweeping portrait of women’s struggles and accomplishments from the mountains to the coast and from early settlement to the early twentieth century represents the culmination of an outpouring of extraordinary scholarship on North Carolina women that began in the 1980s. It should be read by anyone who cares about our common past.

author of Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

“The stories in this wonderful addition to the Southern Women: Their Lives and Times series are a pleasure to read and contemplate. The diversity of women featured has much to teach us about North Carolina history, as well as about the larger story of women in the South and, indeed, the nation.” —Joan Marie Johnson, coeditor, South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

“From colonial patriots and slave resisters to Progressive Era reformers and self-made women, this excellent collection of essays challenges the reader to recognize the remarkable contributions and sustaining histories of black, white, and Native American women in the Tar Heel State.”—Elizabeth Hayes Turner, author of Women and Gender in the New South, 1865–1945

"Once you have read the stories of these amazing women, you will never see southern history in quite the same way again. This sweeping portrait of women’s struggles and accomplishments from the mountains to the coast and from early settlement to the early twentieth century represents the culmination of an outpouring of extraordinary scholarship on North Carolina women that began in the 1980s. It should be read by anyone who cares about our common past."—Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, author of Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching

From the Publisher