Description: Examines women writers in the nineteenth-century South, offering new insights into women and gender roles.
Brief description: Jonathan Daniel Wells is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820-1861 and Entering the Fray: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South. He is a co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, The Southern Middle Class in the Nineteenth Century. He has published several reviews and articles on nineteenth-century America, the Civil War, slavery, gender, politics, class and intellectual life, in journals such as The Journal of Southern History, American Nineteenth-Century History and the Maryland Historical Magazine.
Review Quotes: "In his finely written account of female journalists in the nineteenth-century South, Jonathan Wells fills a significant gap in our understanding of southern women's history of the period. Through his deft research of southern magazines and periodicals, Wells proves that both black and white women were as politically and socially engaged as their northern counterparts, and that they have long been far more interested in the power of the pen than in the products of their sewing needles."
Karen Cox, University of North Carolina, Charlotte