Gender & American culture

"In this collection, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. Through six essays, she explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery by closely examining individuals like white plantation mistress turned feminist Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and black Communist Hosea Hudson. Painter defies the usual boundaries of southern history, women's history, and African American history and transcends methodological barriers as well, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science in addition to social, cultural and intellectual history."--BOOK JACKET.

"In the fall of 1942 a young black law student at Howard University visited a class in constitutional law taught by one of the nation's leading historians: so began the decades-long friendship between Pauli Murray, the student, and Caroline Ware, the historian. This collection of their letters begins in 1943 and continues (with few interruptions) until Murray's death in 1985. The correspondence illuminates a significant period in what is now labeled the "long civil rights movement" as well as the early days of second wave feminism." "Ware (1899-1990) was a Boston Brahmin, an accomplished social historian, a consumer advocate, and a community development specialist who worked in Asia and virtually every Latin American country. Among Ware's other activities, she edited the final volume of UNESCO's History of Mankind. Murray (1910-1985), raised in North Carolina, became a labor lawyer, a teacher, and a lifelong political and social activist. As a writer, she is best known for her family memoir Proud Shoes and her epic poem Dark Testament. Murray also was the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest." "The wide-ranging topics of their correspondence include civil rights, electoral politics, the labor movement, the debate about the Fair Employment Practices Committee, McCarthyism, feminism, and the National Organization for Women (of which both were founding members), as well as personal and private concerns. Their words capture the unguarded thoughts and reactions of two highly intelligent women - one white, one black: one a northerner, one a southerner - both dedicated to the cause of human rights. In the process, the letters paint compelling self-portraits."--Jacket.

"This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and maternity reconstruct the "classic" proletarian novel to speak about both the working-class woman and the radical female intellectual." "Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's Daughters of Earth (1929) and Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942). In all, Rabinowitz surveys more than forty novels of the period, many largely forgotten. Discussing these novels in the contexts of literary radicalism and of women's literary tradition, she reads them as both cultural history and cultural theory. Through a consideration of the novels as a genre, Rabinowitz is able to theorize about the interrelationship of class and gender in American culture. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analyzing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences and behavior reflected and influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state and region. Her work expands our knowledge of black and white women by studying them outside the plantation setting. Bynum searched local and state court records, public documents, and manuscript collections to locate and document the lives of these otherwise ordinary, obscure women. Some appeared in court as abused, sometimes abusive, wives, as victims and sometimes perpetrators of violent assaults, or as participants in illicit, interracial relationships. During the Civil War, women frequently were cited for theft, trespassing, or rioting, usually in an effort to gain goods made scarce by war. Some women were charged with harboring evaders or deserters of the Confederacy, an act that reflected their conviction that the Confederacy was destroying them. These politically powerless unruly women threatened to disrupt the underlying social structure of the Old South, which depended upon the services and cooperation of all women. Bynum examines the effects of women's social and sexual behavior on the dominant society and shows the ways in which power flowed between the private and public spheres. Whether wives or unmarried, enslaved or free, women were active agents of the society's ordering and dissolution.

Discusses how class, race, and gender shaped women's experiences in the South.

How Am I to Be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith offers the first full portrait of the life and work of the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966) devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters boldly explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing experience for all its people - white and black, male and female, rich and poor. Smith's best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killer of the Dream (1949), an autobiographical critique of southern race relations that angered many southerners, including powerful moderates. Subsequently, Smith was effectively silenced as a writer.^ An avid letter-writer, Smith mastered the epistolary form in her work as director of her family's Laurel Falls Camp, an innovative summer camp for girls in the north Georgia mountains. There she developed her critique of southern attitudes about race and gender, her concern for children, and her theories of social change. Over the years her correspondents included Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright, and the leaders of such organizations as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the NAACP, and CORE. Margaret Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume.^ Arranged chronologically and annotated, the letters provide a rich context for reading Smith's published work and reveal valuable personal and professional information: her courageous fight against racial segregation; her fears about remaining in Georgia, where her property was the target of arson several times; her depression at having been silenced as a writer; her thirteen-year battle against cancer; and the full burden of her struggle as a woman living and writing in the Deep South in the five decades between the two feminist movements of the twentieth century. Gladney's editorial commentary brings into central focus Smith's enduring lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling and creates a portrait of Lillian Smith which recognizes and challenges the attitudes toward gender and sexuality that shaped and defined her life, her choices of self definition, and her critical reception as a writer.^ Gladney argues that Smith's triple isolation - political, sexual, and artistic - from mainstream southern culture permitted her to see and to expose southern prejudices with unique clarity.