Writing Womens History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott

Essays on how womens history is written in the wake of The Southern Lady Contributions from Laura F. Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Glenda E. Gilmore, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Kelley, Markeeva Morgan, Anne Firor Scott, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Deborah Gray White Anne Firor Scotts 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 womens 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 womens lives. In doing so, she helped to open up vast terrains of womens experiences for historical scholarship. This volume, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippis annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together essays by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American womens history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These essays together demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scotts and other early American women historians work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude. Elizabeth Anne Payne, Oxford, Mississippi, is professor of history at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Womens Trade Union League and coeditor of vols. I and II of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.