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This biography recounts the life of a Southern citizen activist whose career of social advocacy extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement. Born in 1879 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, into a German-Jewish family with antebellum southern roots, Weil was a cosmopolitan in a provincial society. Graduating from Smith College, she returned to Goldsboro and joined the Women's Club movement where as “Federation Gertie” she advocated for women's rights and against the exploitation of child and woman millworkers. As president of the state women's suffrage league, she fought but ultimately failed to win ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920 she became founding president of the North Carolina League of Women Voters, using it as base for progressive social legislation. In the Depression years, she worked for labor rights and poverty relief. Weil was both a Southern Lady, holding traditional social values, and a New Woman, forging a public career in the civic marketplace. An observant Reform Jew, she inherited from her mother a commitment to Zionism. Active in organizations dedicated to world peace and internationalism, she abandoned her pacifism in World War II and worked to save her German family from the Holocaust. Her last crusade, prior to her death in 1971, was in support of black civil rights.

Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women’s diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women’s lives. In doing so, Scott helped to open up vast terrains of women’s experiences for historical scholarship. This book, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi’s annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together chapters by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women’s history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These chapters demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott’s and other early American women historians’ work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.