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The movers and shakers of women’s history during second-wave feminism and particularly the women who in 1970 founded the Southern Association of Women Historians (named changed to Southern Association for Women Historians in 1985) would likely be surprised as well as delighted by current strides by feminist scholars and women historians in all fields, but particularly in Southern women’s history. They doubtless would be amazed by how the Southern academy has adapted to female colleagues and feminist agendas. Coming together to celebrate fifty years of organizational outreach, mentoring and fundraising, prize-giving and programming, it is a good time not only to take stock of this organization but also to reflect on our academic enterprise: the challenges and accomplishments at half a century. The fluidity and dynamism of women’s history has combined with important recognition of race and region within the American past, and twenty-first-century shifts take into account the dramatic acceleration of historical revisionism.

The Southern Association for Women Historians provided a place where female historians felt validated and emboldened. By providing this space over the past five decades, the SAWH has done two important things: advance the careers of individual female historians while encouraging, developing, and legitimizing the study of women’s history. In the process, as several of the scholars here have already suggested, the SAWH helped transform the historiography of the American South by refocusing many of the lenses that scholars have trained on the past. The history of the SAWH demonstrates the crucial role that scholarly professional associations play in shaping fields of knowledge and the careers of individual scholars.

The Southern Association for Women Historians, has had two missions since its founding in 1970: to support women historians and to promote women’s history. From the beginning, it was an inclusive and non-hierarchical organization that took mentoring colleagues seriously and built structures within the institution to foster it. The SAWH welcomed men as members, along with those scholars who worked independently or outside of the academy, and supported graduate students. The SAWH’s collaborative model and conferences provided a robust forum for the exchange of ideas. At the SAWH’s founding, it was a caucus within the Southern Historical Association. In 1975, however, members decided to form a separate organization that could better foster its model of activism for women and women’s scholarship. It worked to increase women members in the SHA and to shape that organization’s rules and culture to be more accepting of women and their scholarship. In addition to this activism, the SAWH helped birth the now robust field of southern women’s history.

At the conclusion of the 1978 Consultation on Women in Church-Related Vocations, women felt hope for their future in ordained ministry as the Woman's Missionary Union was coming to their side and the Christian Life Commission adopted their cause. The chapter discusses the transition of the feminist movement from the 1970s to the 1980s, the establishment of the Southern Baptist Women in Ministry, and the ways in which the women upheld the issue of gender, or gendered concepts of women. It also highlights the struggle's beginning years, from 1979 to 1984, and examines how biblical inerrancy and culture wars caused confusion and animosity between conservatives and moderates.

This chapter discusses Southern Baptist women and domesticity, which became important during the 1950s. By the 1960s however, the women's movement challenged the idealized notions of family and demanded equality for women in the home and in the workplace. It looks at the relationships of the Southern Baptist women, which clearly reveal the complexities and contradictions of the identities of these women. It is important to note that despite the influence of patriarchy, southern culture is considered to be largely matriarchal.

This chapter discusses the role of casserole dishes in Southern Baptist life, focusing mostly on the hospitality and friendship shown among Southern Baptist women. Casseroles have become embedded in southern culture, and women are still the ones who make this economical and convenient dish. Providing meals and other forms of nurture is an important part of how Southern Baptist women embody gender and express their complex identities.

This chapter examines the historical films produced in Hollywood during the period from 1930 to 1939 which focused on the American Civil War and the Reconstruction. The most notable of these types of films are William Wyler's Jezebel and Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind which was based on Margaret Mitchell's award-winning novel of the same title. This chapter discusses the treatment of American history in these films.

The final chapter discusses the persistent distinctiveness of white southern women in American society and culture in the late 1960s. Although the white women who participated in the civil rights movement became feminists, they distinguished themselves from the main feminist trends of the 1970s. The reasons for this are to be found in their southern identity. The chapter examines the women's relationship to their native region, emphasizing the inherent tension between their dissenting stance, and their attachment, even loyalty, to the South. This applies to both generations, whose members kept affirming their southernness while combatting segregation, grounding their action in their native culture. Their distinctiveness reasserted itself during the 1960s, their southern background making them aware of the intersection of race, gender, and to a lesser extent class, in the shaping of their identities. Most non-southern white women did not share this awareness. Consequently, unlike many non-southern feminists who gave priority to fighting patriarchy in the 1970s, the women studied here remained highly sensitive to racism and economic injustice while embracing the cause of gender equality. In refusing to give priority to either race, sex, or class, they actually anticipated later developments in American social and political thought.

This chapter discusses feminism and Southern Baptist women. It is shown that these women feel conflicted about the issue of feminism: some are proudly feminist, while others are adamant that they are not feminist. Most of the Southern Baptist women who contributed to this study, however, see feminists as extremists and distance themselves from the label. When the author defined feminism as a belief in and willingness to work for equality between women and men, almost all of the women who were previously interviewed admitted that they might well be feminist based on the given definition. The discussion also looks at some feminist myths.

This chapter examines the first generation dealt with in the book, mainly represented by churchwomen's groups, the YWCA, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and League of Women Voters. Up to the Brown decision, these women worked against segregation without openly advocating its elimination. They apparently conformed to racial and gender norms but undermined male white supremacy without seeming to do so. Inspired primarily by Christian principles, they gradually evolved from mission work to racial reform, and from cautious bi-racialism to open support of desegregation. Using their status and manners, these ladies rejected the segregationist discourse as immoral, in particular the rhetoric of chivalry that placed white women at the center of the white supremacist doctrine. During the Great Depression and World War II, many also became involved in politics, supporting the New Deal and federal measures in favor of economic, political, and racial equality. Focusing on a variety of emblematic individuals and organizations, the chapter shows that throughout the pre-Brown period, these women asserted themselves as a unique brand of reformers, built extensive networks, and developed a sense of sisterhood, paving the way for the post-Brown generation.

This chapter examines representations of southern women within labor history. For many generations, southern labor history focused on two primary groups of women: “heroines,” individual women who performed extraordinary feats, and “girl strikers,” women whose protests were both collective and public. These stereotypes framed popular and academic histories of southern women and the labor movement and resonated profoundly in southern culture. This chapter compares these mythical images with the reality of southern women's lives as workers and with their roles as labor activists. Challenging these enduring stereotypes helps expand one's historical understanding of the full range of southern women's involvement in the labor movement and other networks of dissent. Neither heroines nor girl strikers but conscious of that history, these women took their place in the union and saw their future and that of their children in the labor movement.

This chapter explores black folks' varied performances of gender and understanding of gendered roles and behaviors. While black feminist research has thoroughly analyzed the complicated sets of controlling images, from the lady to the mammy to the bitch, that govern black women's presentations of self, how these categories intersect with regional gender norms is under-theorized. More often than not, black women have to contend with systems of power that deny access not only to any positive construction of femininity but to humanity as well. While black women overall were historically excluded and continue to be excluded from categories of femininity, the institutionalized devaluation of their bodies in the Jim Crow South meant a unique process of gender construction and exclusion for southern black women. While white gender archetypes were erected against constructions of black gender archetypes, black folks managed to appropriate categories from which they were excluded—belle, lady, and gentleman, for instance—and participate in a racialized version of regional culture that wrested some dignity through performance.

This chapter discusses soul competency, which claims that the individual can know and deal directly with God. At the root of Baptist identity is the notion that each person can go directly to God without the need for any mediator. The Southern Baptist women in this study share an unwavering sense of their own ability to hear the voice of God and act on what they believe God calls them to do.

Chapter Five centers on how the white team members exploited their gender, age, and class as an entrée to meet with the southern women for coffee and conversation, arguing that WIMS conducted its real work for change in this setting. Here, the northern women discussed what they had seen at the Freedom Summer projects with the southern women and encouraged them to take a more open approach to racial issues. The chapter focuses on how WIM’s quiet approach created the perception that the teams were doing women’s work in the Progressive tradition and acting in ways appropriate to mothers. It details both the set-backs and the successes as the teams worked to open lines of communication and build bridges across race, region, and religion. Meetings between black team members and local black women are also discussed, particularly the impact on the northern black women who developed a greater understanding of the South’s problems.

Corra Harris was the most widely published and one of the most nationally popular woman writers in the United States during the twentieth century. Critics during her day and since have had a difficulty in categorizing Harris's works, often dismissing her work as part of a lightweight genre of domestic fiction. Harris's life and work do not fit wholly into any category. Harris simply defied characterization. Harris popularity and legacy first derived from A Circuit Rider's Wife. Since the book is marginally autobiographical, many readers remember Harris as the “circuit rider's wife”. This Introduction outlines the topics the other chapters in this book discuss. This book offers a glimpse of Harris's fascinating life and writing career. This book looks at the issues of race, class, and gender found in the works and literature of Harris. These issues found a constant struggle with the belief, experience, and values of Corra Harris. This book demonstrates the ways in which Harris's work and life both differed from and matched thouse of other southern women writers of her time. The book also reveals the manner in which time and place intersect with class, gender, race, and other variables in the forging of identity in her writing.