The history of suffrage in the South—indeed, the nation—is messy and fraught, and more contentious than is typically remembered. As historian Crystal N. Feimster has shown in her dual biography of political activists Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Rebecca Latimer Felton, the history is one of white supremacy and women’s rights, freedom and oppression, and how these contradictions intertwined in the lives of southern women. Black suffragists like Wells-Barnett fought for the vote as part of broad struggles for civil rights and to end lynching and racial terror. White women, such as Rebecca Latimer Felton, charted a path for white women’s independence through white female supremacy. Other white southern women, trained in the suffrage movement and influenced by Black-led anti-lynching campaigns in the 1930s, coordinated to challenge racial terror. They argued that white men implicated white women in lynching when they claimed to protect their womanhood—thus lynching was an issue they must take up. This fuller history of suffrage and women’s rights in the South does not lend itself easily to marches and celebrations, cocktail hours or galas. Nonetheless, it is our history.
This issue of Southern Cultures takes the centennial as a springboard to reflect on political power, women’s activism, and civic cultures. From the point of view of women who lived, worked, struggled, created in, and sometimes fled the South, the authors here explore women’s intellectual and embodied relationship to place. We begin fittingly with an essay by Beth Kruse, Rhondalyn K. Peairs, Jodi Skipper, and Shennette Garrett-Scott about the Black political culture in North Mississippi that shaped pioneering journalist, civil rights activist, and suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who posthumously received the Pulitzer Prize this past spring. Her legacy is carried forth in contemporary protests for racial justice, the search for truth, and in bold defiance of racialized sexual and gender codes.
Why the “Women’s Issue”?
If the Nineteenth Amendment is a starting place for this issue, the 1960s and ’70s are the crux of it—these decades birthed women’s history as a field and, arguably, a distinctly southern women’s history. The title draws inspiration from a dynamic print culture that flourished in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, the era of liberation movements. With women at the helm as guest editors, journals and underground publications across the region and nation printed special “women’s issues.” Our issue follows in that spirit but, unlike those from the past, it is not committed to a binary model of gender (frequently coded as white), as the title may suggest. Rather, the authors here consider how women in the South—including Black, Latina, queer, lesbian, trans, working-class, and white—experienced, challenged, and navigated notions of southern womanhood, a historically specific and, often, contradictory ideological process.