North Carolina Women

Their Lives and Times

Michele Gillespie, Sally McMillen

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Print ISBN: 9780820340005, 9780820339993
• eBook ISBN: 9780820346540
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

North Carolina has had more than its share of accomplished, influential women—women who have expanded their sphere of influence or broken through barriers that had long defined and circumscribed their lives, women such as Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, the widow and tavern owner who supported the American Revolution; Harriet Jacobs, runaway slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds, elite women who promoted women's equality. This collection of essays examines the lives and times of pathbreaking North Carolina women from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, offering important new insights into the variety of North Carolina women's experiences across time, place, race, and class, and conveys how women were able to expand their considerable influence during periods of political challenge and economic hardship, particularly over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These essays highlight North Carolina's progressive streak and its positive impact on women's education—for white and black alike— beginning in the antebellum period on through new opportunities that opened up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They explore the ways industrialization drew large numbers of women into the paid labor force for the first time and what the implications of this tremendous transition were; they also examine the women who challenged traditional gender roles, as political leaders and labor organizers, as runaways, and as widows. The volume is especially attuned to differences in region within North Carolina, delineating women's experiences in the eastern third of the state, the piedmont, and the western mountains.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Edenton Ladies Women, Tea, and Politics in Revolutionary North Carolina
• Sister Anna An African Woman in Early North Carolina
• Elizabeth Maxwell Steele “A Great Politician” and the Revolution in the Southern Backcountry
• Rose O’Neal Greenhow “Bearer of Dispatches to the Confederate Government”
• Catherine Devereux Edmondston “My lines are cast in such pleasant places”
• Harriet and Louisa Jacobs “Not without My Daughter”
• Cornelia Phillips Spencer The Foremost Daughter of North Carolina and the Contradictions of a Nineteenth-Century Public Life
• Alice Morgan Person “My life has been out of the ordinary run of woman’s life” Alice Morgan Person
• Mary Bayard Clarke Design for “Upsetting the Established Order of Our Dear Old Conservative State”
• Anna Julia Cooper Black Feminist Scholar, Educator, and Activist
• Sallie Southall Cotten Organized Womanhood Comes to North Carolina
• Annie Lowrie Alexander “A Woman Doing a Great Work in a Womanly Way”
• Sarah Cowan “Daisy” Denson The Lost Matriarch of State Public Welfare Reform
• Sarah Dudley Pettey “A New Age Woman” and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender in North Carolina
• Mary Martin Sloop Mountain Miracle Worker
• Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds The Public Lives of Progressive North Carolina’s Wealthiest Women
• Arizona Nick Swaney Blankenship Becoming Cherokee
• Samantha Biddix Bumgarner Country Music Pioneer
• Contributors
• Index