Spring 2008 - University of Georgia Press

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July 6 x 9 | 264 pp. | 16 b&w photos Cloth, $39.95s | 978-0-8203-3095-2 Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875–1915 Joan Marie Johnson Southern womanhood and liberal northern education From the end of Reconstruction and into the New South era, more than one thousand white southern women attended one of the Seven Sister colleges: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Joan Marie Johnson looks at how such educations—in the North, at some of the country’s best schools—influenced southern women to challenge their traditional gender roles and become active in woman suffrage and other social reforms of the Progressive Era South. Attending one of the Seven Sister colleges, Johnson argues, could transform a southern woman indoctrinated in notions of domesticity and dependence into someone with newfound confidence and leadership skills. Many southern students at northern schools imported the values they imbibed at college, returning home to found schools of their own, women’s clubs, and woman suffrage associations. At the same time, during college and after graduation, southern women maintained a complicated relationship to home, nurturing their regional identity and remaining loyal to the Confederacy. Also of interest Mississippi Women Their Histories, Their Lives Edited by Martha H. Swain, Elizabeth Anne Payne, and Marjorie Julian Spruill Associate Editor, Susan Ditto Paper, $22.95t | 978-0-8203-2503-3 Cloth, $44.95t | 978-0-8203-2502-6 Journey toward Justice Juliette Hampton Morgan and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Mary Stanton Cloth, $29.95t | 978-0-8203-2857-7 Johnson explores why students sought a classical, liberal arts education, how they prepared for entrance examinations, and how they felt as southerners on northern campuses. She draws on personal writings, information gleaned from college publications and records, and data on the women’s decisions about marriage, work, children, and other lifealtering concerns. In their time, the women studied in this book would eventually make up a disproportionately high percentage of the elite southern female leadership. This collective biography highlights their important role in forging new roles for women, especially in social reform, education, and suffrage. “Johnson does for the Seven Sisters what historian Anne Firor Scott first did for Troy Female Seminary, showing how graduates ‘disseminated the feminist values they learned there.’ This superbly researched work will be a valuable addition to the historiography on women’s higher education, the Progressive Era, and the region.” —Amy Thompson McCandless, author of The Past in the Present Joe Davis Joan Marie Johnson is a lecturer in women’s history and southern history at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the cofounder and codirector of the Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender at the Newberry Library in Chicago and is the author of Southern Ladies, New Women. History 22 The University of Georgia Press Spring & Summer 2008
“Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact” Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow July 6 x 9 | 176 pp. Cloth, $34.95s | 978-0-8203-3069-3 Jennifer Jensen Wallach How should historians use autobiography? Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre’s possibilities and limitations. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright. Wallach argues that the field of autobiography studies, which is currently dominated by literary critics, needs a new theoretical framework that allows historians, too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing. Her most provocative claim is that, due to the aesthetic power of literary language, skilled creative writers are uniquely positioned to capture the complexities of another time and another place. Through techniques such as metaphor and irony, memoirists collectively give their readers an empathetic understanding of life during the era of segregation. Although these reminiscences bear certain similarities, it becomes clear that the South as it was remembered by each is hardly the same place. “Historians and particularly history students will find many valuable insights in this book. Wallach lays out a theoretical framework for understanding memoirs as source material and then does an excellent job of putting that theory into practice.” —Steve Estes, author of I Am a Man “Wallach’s interdisciplinary training allows her to demonstrate how attention to language, symbolism, allegory, and other literary devices can uncover more historically relevant content in a memoir than a mere surface reading would allow. This is a well-written and well-argued response to a single question: How should historians handle literary memoirs as historical sources?” —Jennifer Ritterhouse, author of Growing Up Jim Crow Also of interest Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance The Diary of David J. Mays, 1954-1959 Edited by James R. Sweeney Cloth, $39.95s | 978-0-8203-3025-9 Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow Adele Oltman Cloth, $34.95s | 978-0-8203-3036-5 Jennifer Jensen Wallach is an assistant professor of history at Georgia College and State University. She has also taught at Stonehill College. Charles Bittner History www.ugapress.org 800.266.5842 23
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Spring 2008 - University of Georgia Press

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