“Can the Sistas Get Some History, Too?”

This chapter explores black women’s contributions to southern history by considering the contours and nuances of their intersectional experiences. Jones-Branch highlights the scholarly production that has resulted from often overlooked or underutilized resources that reveal the intellectual labor in which black women engaged as they carefully assessed and navigated the temporal and geographical times in which they lived. This chapter, additionally, demands a reconceptualization of the ways that southern women’s history has been understood and consumed in the absence of black women’s stories. It challenges historians to generate scholarship that elucidates black women by mining and reading traditional archival sources against the grain and creatively finding ways to access nontraditional sources to augment their voices.

Barbarians at the Doorbell

The great expansion of southern women’s history over the past half century has been fueled in part by the pioneering archival projects launched by women historians and other specialists. The SAWH became an important resource for growing the field. A steady parade of researchers stopped begging for crumbs and began to make demands. These demands included marching right up to the front door, ringing the bell and refusing to be denied entry. The creation of guides to resources and digitization of resources has advanced research and writing in the field, transforming archives and collections by including issues of gender and sexuality. By applying pressure in a positive and persistent manner, historians and activists pushed ahead and created the framework for southern women’s history to flourish. A flurry of handbooks emerged as librarians and archivists began to amass new materials, to prepare and publish elaborate and engaging guides, and to connect these resources to larger questions in the field. The project of southern women’s history has become less about gatekeeping and more about raising the roof. The SAWH stimulated the expansion of southern history to be collected, recorded, sorted, and digitized for public consumption.

Sisterly Networks

Tracing the development of the field of southern women’s history over the past half century, Sisterly Networks shows how pioneering feminists laid the foundation for a strong community of sister scholars and delves into the work of an organization central to this movement, the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Launched in 1970, the SAWH provided programming, mentoring, fundraising, and outreach efforts to support women historians working to challenge the academic establishment. In this book, leading scholars reflect on their own careers in southern history and their experiences as women historians amid this pathbreaking expansion and revitalization of the field. Their stories demonstrate how women created new archival collections, expanded historical categories to include gender and sexuality, reimagined the roles and significance of historical women, wrote pioneering monographs, and mentored future generations of African American women and other minorities who entered the academy and contributed to public discourse. Providing a lively roundtable discussion of the state of the field, contributors comment on present and future work environments and current challenges in higher education and academic publishing. They offer profound and provocative insights on the ways scholars can change the future through radically rewriting the gender biases of recorded history.

Introduction

The introduction explains how analysis of the mission work performed by Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston contributes to studies of historically black education, American Protestant church history, southern history, colonialism, and the African diaspora. It states how the activities of these two ministers added nuance to two major controversies in their lifetimes: the development of race-specific pedagogy and the expansion of segregation among many American Protestant denominations. The source material used to analyze the Edmistons and the American Presbyterian Congo Mission is introduced in comparison with scholarly perspectives on how African villagers and students also shaped mission policies.

The Southern Side of Chicago: Arnold R. Hirsch and the Renewal of Southern Urban History

This essay maintains that Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago must be viewed as critical to the evolution of Southern history. The author shows how Hirsch’s handling of white anxiety, racial terrorism, and state actions in the preservation of racial segregation helped move Southern historians to adopt a comparative and structural approach to racial politics and metropolitan life. It also encouraged them to abandon interpretive frameworks that treated the South as exceptional, thus proving critical to the development of “Sunbelt” urban history. The fact of Hirsch’s own residing in the South and his collaborations with Southern historians during the publication of Making the Second Ghetto offers additional context to explain the book’s resonance in Southern historiography.