North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 1

by Angela Robbins (Contribution by), Corey Stewart (Contribution by), Cynthia A. Kierner (Contribution by), Elizabeth Lundeen (Contribution by), James Alsop (Contribution by)

Overview

North Carolina has had more than its share of accomplished, influential women—women who have expanded their sphere of influence or broken through barriers that had long defined and circumscribed their lives, women such as Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, the widow and tavern owner who supported the American Revolution; Harriet Jacobs, runaway slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds, elite women who promoted women’s equality. This collection of essays examines the lives and times of pathbreaking North Carolina women from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, offering important new insights into the variety of North Carolina women’s experiences across time, place, race, and class, and conveys how women were able to expand their considerable influence during periods of political challenge and economic hardship, particularly over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These essays highlight North Carolina’s progressive streak and its positive impact on women’s education—for white and black alike— beginning in the antebellum period on through new opportunities that opened up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They explore the ways industrialization drew large numbers of women into the paid labor force for the first time and what the implications of this tremendous transition were; they also examine the women who challenged traditional gender roles, as political leaders and labor organizers, as runaways, and as widows. The volume is especially attuned to differences in region within North Carolina, delineating women’s experiences in the eastern third of the state, the piedmont, and the western mountains.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820346540
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	02/15/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	6 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.


JIM DOWNS is a professor of history and American studies at Connecticut College. He is the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.
JOHN C. INSCOE is a professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia and the founding editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia. He is coauthor of The Heart of Confederate Appalachia.
ROBERT HUNT FERGUSON is an associate professor of history at Western Carolina University. His work has been published in Arkansas Review, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Southern Cultures, and North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 1 (Georgia).

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

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.

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

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.” —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