Reviews
"This collection of lively essays on South Carolina women demonstrates the enormous diversity of women's situations and experiences and the ways in which race, class, religion, and history complicate gender as a category of analysis. It is a welcome addition to women's history and the history of the South."
—Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Professor of Southern Culture, University of North Carolina
"Engagingly written across all of the chapters, this book is suitable for a wide audience. . . .[R]eaders will be fascinated by the compelling array of women who added to South Carolina's social, political, and economic history."
Jennifer A. Stollman, The South Carolina Historical Magazine
"The real value of this text. . .lies in its inclusiveness"
—Journal of Southern History
"Fascinating insights into some of the women who helped shape South Carolina. . .Together the essays show a collage of the types of women who make up our history and their strong ties to family."
—Post and Courier
Description
The volume begins with a profile of the Lady of Cofitachequi, who sat at the head of an Indian chiefdom and led her people in encounters with Spanish explorers. The essays that follow look at well-known women such as Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who managed several indigo plantations; the abolitionist Angelina Grimke; and Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut. Also included, however, are essays on the much-less-documented lives of poor white farming women (the Neves family of Mush Creek), free African American women (Margaret Bettingall and her daughters), and slave women, the latter based on interviews and their own letters. The essays in volume 1 demonstrate that many women in this most conservative of states, with its strong emphasis on traditional gender roles, carved out far richer public lives than historians have often attributed to antebellum southern women.
Historical figures included:
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Cloth |
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Paper List price: $24.95 978-0-8203-2936-9 05/25/2009 |
Marjorie Julian Spruill is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Valinda W. Littlefield is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Joan Marie Johnson is a lecturer at Northeastern Illinois University.
