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Events in southern history have often been recounted from the top
down, relying on political and economic models to explain
historical changes. Thus, the key players have usually been men who
dominated politics, shaped economic development, and led armies.
However, women who confronted change and shaped it through their
actions also make history from the bottom up. In this collection of
essays, the contributors reexamine major transformative events of
southern history from the late eighteenth century through the civil
rights era. Shifting the focus to the local level, the authors
demonstrate how women participated in creating change, even as they
confronted conditions over which they had little power. In addition
to exploring southern women's lives, this collection shows how the
women shaped southern history. Using new and extensive primary
research, each of these authors presents a new perspective on the
important roles that women of different races and classes have
played in transforming the South at some of its most crucial
turning points, including post-Revolution, Civil War, Jim Crow era,
World War I, and the civil rights movement. Expanded from papers
presented at the Sixth Southern Conference on Women's History in
Athens, Georgia, these essays reflect the depth and breadth of
current vibrant research in southern women's history and contribute
exciting and important new scholarship to the field. Just as
significant, the volume highlights the trends in southern women's
historical scholarship and points toward new directions for future
scholars.
The principal orchestrator of the passage of women's suffrage in
Texas, a founder and national officer of the League of Women
Voters, the first woman to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas,
and a candidate for that state's governor, Minnie Fisher Cunningham
was one of the first American women to pursue a career in party
politics. Cunningham's professional life spanned a half century,
thus illuminating our understanding of women in public life between
the Progressive Era and the 1960s feminist movement.
Cunningham entered politics through the suffrage movement and
women's voluntary association work for health and sanitation in
Galveston, Texas. She quickly became one of the most effective
state suffrage leaders, helping to pass the bill in a region where
opposition to women voters was strongest. In Washington, Cunningham
was one of the core group of suffragists who lobbied the Nineteenth
Amendment through Congress and then traveled the country
campaigning for ratification. After women gained the right to vote
across the nation, she helped found the nonpartisan National League
of Women Voters and organized training schools to teach women the
skills of grassroots organizing, creating publicity campaigns, and
lobbying and monitoring legislative bodies. Through the League, she
became acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt, who credited one of her
speeches with stimulating her own political activity.
Cunningham then turned to the Democratic Party, serving as an
officer of the Woman's National Democratic Club and the Women's
Division of the Democratic National Committee. In 1928 Cunningham
became a candidate herself, making an unsuccessful bid for the U.S.
Senate. An advocate of New Dealreforms, Cunningham was part of the
movement in the 1930s to transform the Democratic Party into the
women's party, and in 1944 she ran for governor on a pro-New Deal
platform.
Cunningham's upbringing in rural Texas made her particularly aware
of the political needs of farmers, women, union labor, and
minorities, and she fought gender, class, and racial discrimination
within a conservative power structure. In the postwar years, she
was called the "very heart and soul of Texas liberalism" as she
helped build an electoral coalition of women, minorities, and male
reformers that could sustain liberal politics in the state and
bring to office candidates including Ralph Yarborough and Bob
Eckhardt.
A leader and role model for the post-suffrage generation,
Cunningham was not satisfied with simply achieving the vote, but
agitated throughout her career to use it to better the lives of
others. Her legacy has been carried on by the many women to whom
she taught successful grassroots strategies for political
organizing.
Minnie Fisher Cunningham was the winner of the Liz Carpenter Award
of the Texas State Historical Association, and the T. R. Fehrenbach
Book Award of the Texas Historical Commission.
Minnie Fisher Cunningham was Texas's most important female political activist. After directing Texas's woman suffrage campaign, she helped found the National League of Women Voters and the Woman's National Democratic Club. A leader of the post-1945 Texas liberal movement, she inspired a generation of young women, including Liz Carpenter and Billie Carr. This is the first biography of the lifelong politician affectionately known as Minnie Fish.
In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina and rode
off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army in a
style that befitted a Southern gentleman: on a fine-blooded horse,
with two slaves to wait on him, two trunks, and his favorite
hunting dog. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and
the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite
Legion as a major of cavalry. He left behind seven children, the
eldest only twelve, and a wife who was eight and a half months
pregnant. As a field officer in a prestigious unit, the
opportunities for fame and glory seemed limitless. Griffin,
however, performed no daring acts, nor did he inspire great loyalty
in his men. Instead, he unknowingly provided a unique and
invaluable portrait of the Confederate officers who formed the core
of Southern political, military, and business leadership.
In A Gentleman and an Officer, Judith N. McArthur and Orville
Vernon Burton have collected eighty of Griffin's letters written at
the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina
coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. Extraordinary in their
breadth and volume, the letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil
War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers,
the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways
officers and enlisted men interacted during the Civil War. Unlike
the reminiscences and biographies of high-ranking, well-known
Confederate officers or studies and edited collections of letters
of members of the rank and file, this collection sheds light on the
life of a middle officer--a life turned upside down by extreme
military hardship and complicated further by the continuing need
for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of
the southern gentry. In these letters, Griffin describes secret
troop movements in various military actions such as the Hampton
Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign (details that would
certainly have been censored in more recent wars). Here he relates
the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and
the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and
Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the legion after Hampton was
wounded. Throughout, as Griffin recounts these most extraordinary
of times, he illuminates the most ordinary of day-to-day issues.
One might expect to find a Confederate officer meditating on
slavery, emancipation, or Lincoln. Instead, we are confronted by
simple humanity and simple concerns, from the weather to gossip.
Monumental historical events intruded on Griffin's life and sent
him off to war, but his heartfelt considerations were about his
family, his community, and his own personal pride. Ultimately,
Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the refinery, the ordeal
by fire, that tested and verified--or modified--Southern upperclass
values.
With a fascinating combination of military and social history, A
Gentleman and an Officer moves from the beginning of the Civil War
at Fort Sumter through the end of the war and Reconstruction,
vividly illustrating how the issues of the Civil War were at once
devastatingly national and revealingly local.
In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina and rode
off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army in a
style that befitted a Southern gentleman: on a fine-blooded horse,
with two slaves to wait on him, two trunks, and his favorite
hunting dog. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and
the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite
Legion as a major of cavalry. He left behind seven children, the
eldest only twelve, and a wife who was eight and a half months
pregnant. As a field officer in a prestigious unit, the
opportunities for fame and glory seemed limitless. Griffin,
however, performed no daring acts, nor did he inspire great loyalty
in his men. Instead, he unknowingly provided a unique and
invaluable portrait of the Confederate officers who formed the core
of Southern political, military, and business leadership.
In A Gentleman and an Officer, Judith N. McArthur and Orville
Vernon Burton have collected eighty of Griffin's letters written at
the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina
coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. Extraordinary in their
breadth and volume, the letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil
War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers,
the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways
officers and enlisted men interacted during the Civil War. Unlike
the reminiscences and biographies of high-ranking, well-known
Confederate officers or studies and edited collections of letters
of members of the rank and file, this collection sheds light on the
life of a middle officer--a life turned upside down by extreme
military hardship and complicated further by the continuing need
for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of
the southern gentry. In these letters, Griffin describes secret
troop movements in various military actions such as the Hampton
Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign (details that would
certainly have been censored in more recent wars). Here he relates
the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and
the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and
Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the legion after Hampton was
wounded. Throughout, as Griffin recounts these most extraordinary
of times, he illuminates the most ordinary of day-to-day issues.
One might expect to find a Confederate officer meditating on
slavery, emancipation, or Lincoln. Instead, we are confronted by
simple humanity and simple concerns, from the weather to gossip.
Monumental historical events intruded on Griffin's life and sent
him off to war, but his heartfelt considerations were about his
family, his community, and his own personal pride. Ultimately,
Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the refinery, the ordeal
by fire, that tested and verified--or modified--Southern upperclass
values.
With a fascinating combination of military and social history, A
Gentleman and an Officer moves from the beginning of the Civil War
at Fort Sumter through the end of the war and Reconstruction,
vividly illustrating how the issues of the Civil War were at once
devastatingly national and revealingly local.
Regionally distinct yet influenced by national trends, women's
progressive culture in Texas offers a valuable opportunity to
analyze the evolution of women's voluntary associations, their
challenges to southern conventions of race and class, and their
quest for social change and political power. Judith McArthur makes
an important and accessible contribution to the study of women's
activism by tracing in detail how general concerns of national
progressive organizations - about pure food, prostitution, and
education reform - shaped programs at state and local levels.
Southern women differed from their northern counterparts by
devising new approaches to settlement work and taking advantage of
World War I to challenge southern gender and racial norms. McArthur
offers a unique analysis of how women in Texas succeeded in
securing partial voting rights before passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment. Throughout her study, McArthur provides valuable
comparisons between North and South, among various southern states,
and between black and white, male and female progressives.
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