Southern Women in the Progressive Era: A Reader

Description:

Riveting, revealing stories from women of all walks of southern life taking on the challenges of the Progressive Era

Brief description: Giselle Roberts is an honorary research associate in history at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her books include The Confederate Belle, The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, and A New Southern Woman: The Correspondence of Eliza Lucy Irion Neilson, 1871-1883.

Review Quotes:

Southern Women in the Progressive Era has an excellent fluidity between the primary source selections, which immediately engage the reader with the events and the main characters. The editors include an extensive forty-six pages of endnotes and index material from numerous archival collections, which creates a blueprint for future research opportunities to add to this growing scholarship. These primary sources, accented with photographs, have been blended together to detail the stories of personal tragedy, economic hardship, and personal conviction of these southern women and their regions. The editors and their contributors focus on retelling individual experiences as they relate to the interdependence between myth, ethnicity, and local history. Roberts and Walker provide a valuable addition to both southern and women's history, which illuminates the Progressive movement and the relationships that crossed and conflicted with societal norms and racial stereotypes.