Writing Women’s History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott

Contributors

211 Contributors Laura F. Edwards Laura Edwards, professor of history at Duke University, received her B.A. from Northwestern University, followed by a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has taught at Duke University since 2000. Professor Edwards’s publications, not unlike those spearheaded by Anne Scott, speak to the ways in which women’s and southern history have come of age, largely through her deft reenvisioning of these fields. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997) and Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (2000) have served to challenge conventional thought regarding gender status and roles within the nineteenth-century South. Positioning the household as the central institution within southern society, Edwards’s research has punctuated the linkages between domesticity and civic, legal, and political rights. This methodology is reminiscent of Scott’s reminder of the importance of the domestic when considering the “great events” of history. Dr. Edwards’s numerous articles, several of them prize winning, on varying aspects of southern history in the nineteenth century relate her interests in women, gender, and the law during slavery and emancipation. Her most recent book, The People and Their Peace: The Reconstitution of Governance in the Post-revolutionary U.S. South, explores the reconfiguration of ordinary citizens to the law and governance, with emphasis on changes in domestic relations, patriarchy, and the status of white women and enslaved women and men in the early nineteenth century. It won the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book published in 2009 on the history of American law and society. Dr. Edwards has won numerous fellowships and awards and has amassed a wide array of professional activities, including service as associate editor of the Law and History Review. Equally noteworthy (and appropriate to mention here) has been Dr. Edwards’s steadfast commitment to the Southern Association of Women Historians (SAWH), of which she has been a member since graduate school and is a past president. The SAWH Contributors 212 molded her development as a scholar of southern history and provided her with professional support, intellectual succor, and companionate research agendas. Indeed, she credits it as being the most important professional organization in her career. It is with such professional and methodological grounding that Dr. Edwards here contemplates the legacy of Anne Scott, who skillfully documented the movement of southern women from the “pedestal” and into politics. Her essay considers the broad and nuanced implications of Professor Scott’s scholarship on the field of southern women’s history. —angela hornsby-gutting University of Mississippi Crystal N. Feimster Crystal Feimster, a native of North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her undergraduate years at Chapel Hill, she became interested in women’s activism. Her Ph.D. in history is from Princeton University, where her dissertation focused on the topic of her essay in this volume. From 2003 to 2010, Professor Feimster served as a member of the Department of History of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a strong center of women’s studies and history and of African American history . In fact, the departments of history at Chapel Hill and Duke University , and their cooperation, played a pivotal role in the establishment and evolution of southern women’s history. She now teaches at Yale’s Department of African American Studies. Anne Scott’s early examination of southern white women’s activism during the Progressive Era exposed caverns of questions about southern women’s history. She then spent the next half century pushing many of us into that abyss. Sometimes our excavations take us to dark places. Feimster ’s study of southern white women who further empowered themselves by literally igniting black men at “lynching bees” illuminates a very dark place. Other times our work takes us to beautiful places—arm-in-arm connections that reverberate across generations. Scott’s study of the relationship between Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware, a black woman and white woman, and their shared vision of racial harmony and justice represents another side of history. These extremes of subject matter—the horrible and the hopeful—and the validity and veracity of both, keep us researching, Contributors 213 writing, arguing, in a vital and sometimes heated dialogue. This intellectual and personal exposure is the heart of the study of southern women’s history and a vital...