Tennessee Women

Their Lives and Times

Beverly Bond, Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Print ISBN: 9780820329499, 9780820329482
• eBook ISBN: 9780820339016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Nan- ye- hi (Nancy Ward): Diplomatic Mother
• Fanny Wright: Battle against Slavery
• Milly Swan Price: Freedom, Kinship, and Property
• Mary Church Terrell: Revisiting the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender
• Alberta Hunter: “She Had the World in a Jug, with the Stopper in Her Hand”
• Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie: Wing Walker, Parachute Jumper, Air Racer
• Sue Shelton White: Lady Warrior
• Charl Ormond Williams: Feminist Politics and Education for Equality
• Lucille Thornburgh: “I Had to Be Right Pushy”
• Martha Ragland: The Evolution of a Political Feminist
• Wilma Dykeman: The Hearth and the Map
• Sarah Colley Cannon (Minnie Pearl): Gossiping about Grinder’s Switch—The Grand Ole Opry and the Modernization of Tennessee
• Diane Judith Nash: A Mission for Equality, Justice, and Social Change
• Wilma Rudolph: Running for Freedom
• Jo Walker- Meador: The Country Music Association
• Bettye Berger: Transforming the Mainstream
• Jocelyn Dan Wurzburg: Feminist and Race Woman
• Doris Bradshaw: Battling Environmental Racism
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index