Reese Library Special Collections: Women of Augusta: Books

This first of two volumes extends from the founding of the colony of Georgia in 1733 up to the Progressive era. From the beginning, Georgia women were instrumental in shaping the state, yet most histories minimize their contributions. The essays in this volume include women of many ethnicities and classes who played an important role in Georgia's history. Though sources for understanding the lives of women in Georgia during the colonial period are scarce, the early essays profile Mary Musgrove, an important player in the relations between the Creek nation and the British Crown, and the loyalist Elizabeth Johnston, who left Georgia for Nova Scotia in 1806. Another essay examines the near-mythical quality of the American Revolution-era accounts of "Georgia's War Woman," Nancy Hart. The later essays are multifaceted in their examination of the way different women experienced Georgia's antebellum social and political life, the tumult of the Civil War, and the lingering consequences of both the conflict itself and Emancipation. After the war, both necessity and opportunity changed women's lives, as educated white women like Eliza Andrews established or taught in schools and as African American women like Lucy Craft Laney, who later founded the Haines Institute, attended school for the first time. Georgia Women also profiles reform-minded women like Mary Latimer McLendon, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Mildred Rutherford, Nellie Peters Black, and Martha Berry, who worked tirelessly for causes ranging from temperance to suffrage to education. The stories of the women portrayed in this volume provide valuable glimpses into the lives and experiences of all Georgia women during the first century and a half of the state's existence. Historical figures include:Mary MusgroveNancy HartElizabeth Lichtenstein JohnstonEllen CraftFanny KembleFrances Butler LeighSusie King TaylorEliza Frances AndrewsAmanda America DicksonMary Ann Harris GayRebecca Latimer FeltonMary Latimer McLendonMildred Lewis RutherfordNellie Peters BlackLucy Craft LaneyMartha BerryCorra HarrisJuliette Gordon Low

"Gender is the last vantage point from which the Civil War has yet to be examined in-depth, says LeeAnn Whites. Gender concepts and constructions, Whites says, deeply influenced the beliefs underpinning both the Confederacy and its vestiges to which white southerners clung for decades after the Confederacy's defeat. Whites's arguments and observations, which center on the effects of the conflict on the South's gender hierarchy, will challenge our understanding of the war and our acceptance of its historiography."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas was an intelligent, spirited woman born in 1834 to one of the wealthiest families in Georgia. She kept a diary for forty-one years of her life before, during, and after the Civil War filled thirteen hand-written volumes with 450,000 words. Her father recognised her love of learning and sent her to the first college for women in America, Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. After college graduation in 1851, she married her Princeton-educated husband in 1852. With the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath, her life changed forever. Thomas experienced loss of wealth, bankruptcy, the death of loved ones, serious illness, and devastating family strife. She gave birth to ten children and saw four of them die. In 1893, Thomas left Augusta and moved to Atlanta where she became active in the Women's Christian Union and the Suffrage Movement. In 1899 she was elected president of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Association.

Power, male privilege, and southern social customs These essays look at southern social customs within a single city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the volume focuses on paternalism between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, elites and the masses, and industrialists and workers. One essay looks at the subordinating effects of paternalism on women in the Old South - slave, free black, and white - and the coping strategies available to each group. Another essay focuses on ""maternalism,"" white male millworkers, and the Knights of Labor union in Augusta. Other essays discuss Augusta's ""aristocracy of color""; missionary work in millworker communities; interracial cooperation in Colored Methodist Episcopal Church matters; and William Jefferson White, an African American minister, newspaper editor, and founder of Morehouse College. The varied and creative responses to paternalism discussed here open new ways to view relationships based on power and negotiated across lines of race, class, and gender.

This fascinating story of Amanda America Dickson, born the privileged daughter of a white planter and an unconsenting slave in antebellum Georgia, shows how strong-willed individuals defied racial strictures for the sake of family. Kent Anderson Leslie uses the events of Dickson's life to explore the forces driving southern race and gender relations from the days of King Cotton through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New South eras. Although legally a slave herself well into her adolescence, Dickson was much favored by her father and lived comfortably in his house, receiving a genteel upbringing and education. After her father died in 1885 Dickson inherited most of his half-million dollar estate, sparking off two years of legal battles with white relatives. When the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the will, Dickson became the largest landowner in Hancock County, Georgia, and the wealthiest black woman in the post-Civil War South. Kent Anderson Leslie's portrayal of Dickson is enhanced by a wealth of details about plantation life; the elaborate codes of behavior for men and women, blacks and whites in the South; and the equally complicated circumstances under which racial transgressions were sometimes ignored, tolerated, or even accepted.

In this study, Christine Jacobson Carter uncovers interesting lives of single women in the bustling urban centres of 19th-century Savannah and Charleston. Carter's focus is on educated, financially secure white women who joined in the culture's celebration of domesticity even though they had not married.

Ranging from Georgia's founding in the 1730s until the American Revolution in the 1770s, ""Georgia's Frontier Women"" explores women's changing roles amid the developing demographic, economic, and social circumstances of the colony's settling. Georgia was launched as a unique experiment on the borderlands of the British Atlantic world. Its female population was far more diverse than any in nearby colonies at comparable times in their formation. Ben Marsh tells a complex story of narrowing opportunities for Georgia's women as the colony evolved from uncertainty toward stability in the face of sporadic warfare, changes in government, land speculation, and the arrival of slaves and immigrants in growing numbers. Marsh looks at the experiences of white, black, and Native American women - old and young, married and single, working in and out of the home. Mary Musgrove, who played a crucial role in mediating colonist-Creek relations, and Marie Camuse, a leading figure in Georgia's early silk industry, are among the figures whose life stories Marsh draws on to illustrate how some frontier women broke down economic barriers and wielded authority in exceptional ways. Marsh also looks at how basic assumptions about courtship, marriage, and family varied over time. To early settlers, for example, the search for stability could take them across race, class, or community lines in search of a suitable partner. This would change as emerging elites enforced the regulation of traditional social norms and as white relationships with blacks and Native Americans became more exploitive and adversarial. Many of the qualities that earlier had distinguished Georgia from other southern colonies faded away.

Alarmed at the growing poverty, illiteracy, class strife, and vulnerability of women after the upheavals of Reconstruction, female activists in Georgia advocated a fair and just system of education as a way of providing economic opportunity for women and the rural and urban poor. Their focus on educational reform transfigured private and public social relations in the New South, as Rebecca S. Montgomery details in this expansive study. The Politics of Education in the New South provides the most complete picture of women's role in expanding the democratic promise of education in the South and reveals how concern about their own status motivated these women to push for reform on behalf of others. Montgomery argues that women's prolonged campaign for educational improvements reflected their concern for distributing public resources more equitably. Middle-class white women in Georgia recognized the crippling effects of discrimination and state inaction, which they came to understand in terms of both gender and class. They subsequently pushed for admission of women to Georgia's state colleges and universities and for rural school improvement, home extension services, public kindergartens, child labor reforms, and the establishment of female-run boarding schools in the mountains of North Georgia. In the process, a distinct female political culture developed that directly opposed the individualism, corruption, and short-sightedness that plagued formal politics in the New South.

This volume gathers nearly half of some 300 letters written by Mary Telfair of Savannah to her best friend, Mary Few of New York. Telfair was born in 1790 to a wealthy, prominent, slaveholding Savannah family. Few, born in 1790 into equally affluent circumstances, moved with her family from Savannah to New York in 1799. Self-exiled because of their strong antislavery views, the Fews never returned to Georgia, yet they remained close to the Telfairs. The close friendship between Telfair and Few ended only with their deaths in the 1870s. Regular travelers, they met on many occasions. Chiefly, however, they kept in touch through frequent correspondence (Few's letters to Telfair remain undiscovered, and may not have not survived). Wherever Telfair happened to be--in Savannah, the northern states, or Europe--she wrote to her friend at least two or three times a month. Telfair's letters offer unique insights into the daily life of her family and the changes wrought by the deaths of so many of its members. The letters also reveal the shared interests and imperatives at the base of her various relationships with elite women, but especially with Mary Few, whom Telfair memorably described as her "Siamese Twin." The two women, neither of whom ever wed, nonetheless discussed the rights and obligations of marriage as well as their own state of "single blessedness." They also conversed about shared intellectual interests--literature, lecture topics, women's education--as well as the foibles of common acquaintances. Here is a fascinating, unfamiliar world as revealed in what editor Betty Wood calls "one of the most remarkable literary exchanges between women of high social rank in the early national and antebellum United States."

"Gender is the last vantage point from which the Civil War has yet to be examined in-depth, says LeeAnn Whites. Gender concepts and constructions, Whites says, deeply influenced the beliefs underpinning both the Confederacy and its vestiges to which white southerners clung for decades after the Confederacy's defeat. Whites's arguments and observations, which center on the effects of the conflict on the South's gender hierarchy, will challenge our understanding of the war and our acceptance of its historiography."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Corra Harris (1869-1935) was one of the most widely published and nationally popular women writers in the United States. A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910) was Georgia's most celebrated novel for nearly three decades. Now little read and almost forgotten, Harris's life offers a fascinating glimpse into a world nearly unimaginable to us today. nbsp; In her writing, Harris poignantly and often humorously captured the paradoxes characteristic of the New South, a time and place of radically divergent goals. Pressed by national and economic demands to modernize, and regional desire to hold on to the past, leaders struggled at the turn of the century to reconcile competing goals. Issues of race, class, and gender found in Harris's writing were at the heart of the struggle. nbsp; In depicting the complexities of Harris's era, her life, and her personality, historian Catherine Oglesby offers a remarkable insight into early twentieth-century literature and culture. She demonstrates the ways Harris's work and life both differed from and were the same as other southern women writers, and reveals the ways time and place intersect with race, class, gender, and other variables in the forging of identity. nbsp;