Writing Women's History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott

250 Pages·2011·1.55 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Anne Payne (Editor)

Writing Women’s History
Credit: Les Todd, Duke University News Service
Writing Women’s History
A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott
(cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2)
Elizabeth Anne Payne
Edited by
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
Color reproductions used in this volume were
made possible through the support of the College
of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi.
Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2011
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Porter L. Fortune, Jr. History Symposium (32nd : 2007 : University
of Mississippi)
Writing women’s history : a tribute to Anne Firor Scott / edited by
Elizabeth Anne Payne.
p. cm. — (Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in
Southern History series)
“Essays in this volume were originally presented at the Thirty-
second Annual Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium at the
University of Mississippi”—
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-61703-173-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-61703-
174-8 (ebook) 1. Women—United States—History—Congresses. I.
Payne, Elizabeth Anne, 1943– II. Title. III. Series.
HQ1410.P67 2007
305.40973—dc22 2011013398
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
For Conwill
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Contents
ix Acknowledgments
—elizabeth anne payne
xiii A Student’s Perspective
—markeeva morgan
xv Introduction
—jacquelyn dowd hall
3 Equally Their Due: Women’s Education and Public Life
in Postrevolutionary and Antebellum America
—mary kelley
28 Down from the Pedestal:
The Influence of Anne Scott’s Southern Ladies
—laura f. edwards
64 “How are the daughters of Eve punished?”:
Rape during the Civil War
—crystal n. feimster
82 “A Quilt unlike Any Other”:
Rediscovering the Work of Harriet Powers
—laurel thatcher ulrich
117 Taking Care of Bodies, Babies, and Business:
Black Women Health Professionals in South Carolina, 1895–1954
—darlene clark hine
142 From Jim Crow to Jane Crow, or How Anne Scott and
Pauli Murray Found Each Other
—glenda elizabeth gilmore
viii Contents
172 The Million Mom March: The Perils of Color-Blind Maternalism
—deborah gray white
203 Writing Women’s History: A Response
—anne firor scott
211 Contributors
223 Index
Acknowledgments
The essays in this volume were originally presented at the thirty-second
annual Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium at the University of Mis-
sissippi. Organized in 1975, the symposium honors the late Porter L. For-
tune Jr., a historian who served as chancellor of the university from 1968
to 1984 and was pivotal in launching the symposium. Past symposia have
covered the terrain of the American South’s history and include slavery,
manners, civil rights, sports, gender, religion, and Native Americans.
Elizabeth Fortune has generously supported the History Symposium since
its beginning, and she graciously assisted in planning this symposium on
writing women’s history.
Choosing Anne Firor Scott’s work and its impact on women’s history
as the emphasis of the symposium was easy. The fruitful intersection of the
publication in 1970 of The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–
1930 with the rising women’s movement meant that historians responded
with a keen interest to both the approach and message of the book. Using
women’s diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott demon-
strated brilliantly that the familiar dichotomy of personal versus public,
private versus civic, that had dominated traditional scholarship about men
could not be made to fit women’s lives. In doing so, she helped to open up
vast terrains of women’s neglected experiences for historical study. Her stu-
dent Sara Evans, for example, would publish Personal Politics: The Roots of
Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1980).
Anne Scott has been a mentor to many women (and men) who were
not her own students, including myself. I worked at Duke University’s
Women’s College during the academic year of 1967–68 and admired from
a distance this attractive, no-nonsense female history professor who wore
flat shoes, short hair, and no makeup. I continue to regret that I did not
take her course during that year—I was at that point too timid—as it would
have saved me detours in my career. I attended the University of Chicago
Press’s announcement of The Southern Lady in 1970, by which time I had
become a student of history. I listened intently and with gratitude as Anne
described southern women in a different vein and in a way that corre-
sponded to the stories of women in my own family. Later she coedited the
ix