As women's history has embraced the contributions of multi-culturalism, crucial intersections between gender and race, ideology and identity, and work and life have converged to enrich the mainstream of American history. The parameters that once defined women's history have broadened from the experiences of just a few white middle-class women to include those of women from all walks of life.
Representing some of the best and most recent scholarly work in the field, the subjects of these essays reflect the diversity of southern women's lives. Women in prisons, in mental institutions, in labor unions; women activists for temperance, suffrage, birth control, and civil rights; women at home and in public life: all add their individual histories to help reshape the terrain of the American past.
Southern women's history contines to make pathbreaking strides, and students of women's history, southern history, ethnic studies, sociology, and psychology will find this volume's contributions invaluable.
About the Author: Virginia Bernhard is Professor and Chair of History at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. She is the author of several books, including A Durable Fire.
Betty Brandon is Professor of History at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Her work has appeared in the Encyclopedia of Southern History and the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is Elenore Raoul Professor of Humanities at Emory University in Atlanta. Her publications include Feminism Without Illusions.
Theda Perdue is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She is the author of Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1865.
Elizabeth H. Turner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown. She is the author of the forthcoming book Women's Culture and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920.
