"South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times—Volume 2 brings together distinguished historians who vividly recapture representative black and white South Carolina women. The articles are lively and the editors ground them in deep historical context that belies any notion of a stagnant state from Reconstruction to World War II. Read any one of these and you will want to read all."
—Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University

Description

The biographical essays in this volume provide new insights into the various ways that South Carolina women asserted themselves in their state and illuminate the tension between tradition and change that defined the South from the Civil War through the Progressive Era. As old rules—including gender conventions that severely constrained southern women—were dramatically bent if not broken, these women carved out new roles for themselves and others.

The volume begins with a profile of Laura Towne and Ellen Murray, who founded the Penn School on St. Helena Island for former slaves. Subsequent essays look at such women as the five Rollin sisters, members of a prominent black family who became passionate advocates for women’s rights during Reconstruction; writer Josephine Pinckney, who helped preserve African American spirituals and explored conflicts between the New and Old South in her essays and novels; and Dr. Matilda Evans, the first African American woman licensed to…

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