This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their deserved place in its written record. The women whose absorbing life stories are told here range from Felicite Girodeau of old Natchez, who was both a person of color and a slaveholder, to Vera Mae Pigee, who "mothered" the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they...

This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their deserved place in its written record. The women whose absorbing life stories are told here range from Felicite Girodeau of old Natchez, who was both a person of color and a slaveholder, to Vera Mae Pigee, who "mothered" the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they...

Volume 1 of "Mississippi Women" enriched our understanding of women s roles in the state s history through profiles of notable, though often neglected, individuals. Volume 2 explores the historical forces that have shaped women s lives in Mississippi. Covering an expanse of time from early European settlement through the course of the twentieth century, the essays in the second volume acknowledge the state s diverse cultural and physical landscapes as they discuss how issues of race, gender, and class affected women s lives in various private and public spheres.

Essays on the state s...

Anne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women's diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit...