North Carolina Women - (Southern Women: Their Lives and Times) by Michele Gillespie & Sally G McMillen (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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"

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"

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.