Tennessee Women

Their Lives and Times, Volume 1

Edited by Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Greene Bond

Associate editor Laura Helper-Ferris

Title Details

Pages: 480

Illustrations: 17 b&w photos

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Hardcover

Pub Date: 02/15/2009

ISBN: 9-780-8203-2948-2

List Price: $120.95

Paperback

Pub Date: 02/15/2009

ISBN: 9-780-8203-2949-9

List Price: $36.95

Tennessee Women

Their Lives and Times, Volume 1

Edited by Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Greene Bond

Associate editor Laura Helper-Ferris

Skip to

  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

Including suffragists, civil rights activists, and movers and shakers in politics and in the music industries of Nashville and Memphis, as well as many other notables, this collective portrait of Tennessee women offers new perspectives and insights into their dreams, their struggles, and their times. As rich, diverse, and wide-ranging as the topography of the state, this book will interest scholars, general readers, and students of southern history, women's history, and Tennessee history.

Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times shifts the historical lens from the more traditional view of men's roles to place women and their experiences at center stage in the historical drama. The eighteen biographical essays, written by leading historians of women, illuminate the lives of familiar figures like reformer Frances Wright, blueswoman Alberta Hunter, and the Grand Ole Opry's Minnie Pearl (Sarah Colley Cannon) and less-well-known characters like the Cherokee Beloved Woman Nan-ye-hi (Nancy Ward), antebellum free black woman Milly Swan Price, and environmentalist Doris Bradshaw.

Told against the backdrop of their times, these are the life stories of women who shaped Tennessee's history from the eighteenth-century challenges of western expansion through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles against racial and gender oppression to the twenty-first-century battles with community degradation. Taken as a whole, this collection of women's stories illuminates previously unrevealed historical dimensions that give readers a greater understanding of Tennessee's place within environmental and human rights movements and its role as a generator of phenomenal cultural life.

The richness and variety of the voices represented in these essays will be useful in many ways. The breadth of the women’s experiences and the broad span of time their lives touched will ensure the work’s appeal to a wide audience.

—Cynthia Griggs Fleming, author of In the Shadow of Selma: The Continuing Struggle for Civil Rights in the Rural South

By focusing on the lives of individual women, known and unknown, over many years, this volume is an important addition to the history of Tennessee and the evolving history of southern women.

—Anne Firor Scott, W.K.Boyd Professor Emerita, Duke University

The authors of these well-researched and gracefully written biographical studies admirably capture the complexities of multitextured lives of diverse women who were often heroines on their own terms. Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Greene Bond have edited an outstanding work, one that makes a major contribution to American women's history, southern history, and especially to the history of Tennessee.

—Darlene Clark Hine, editor, Black Women in America

This book makes a major contribution to American women’s history, southern history, and especially to the history of the Volunteer State.

The Courier

Tennessee Women provides a fascinating look at the lives of women who played public roles as activists, artists, athletes, and executives.

—LeeAnn G. Reynolds, Tennessee Historical Quarterly

Aram Goudsouzian

Betty Huehls

Carole Bucy

Celia Morris

Cherisse Jones-Branch

Connie L. Lester

Cynthia Cumfer

Diane Pecknold

Gail S. Murray

Janann Sherman

Kristine M. McCusker

Laura Helper-Ferris

Linda Wynn

Melissa Checker

Melissa Walker Heidari

Michelle R. Scott

About the Author/Editor

Sarah Wilkerson Freeman (Editor)
SARAH WILKERSON FREEMAN is a professor of history at Arkansas State University. She is a contributor to Southern Women at the Millennium and Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, as well as to numerous journals.

Beverly Greene Bond (Editor)
BEVERLY GREENE BOND is an associate professor of history and director of African and African American Studies at the University of Memphis. She is the co-editor of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, with Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, Vol. 1 (2009) and Vol. 2 (Georgia 2015) and Images of America: Beale Street with Janann Sherman (Arcadia Publishing 2006).