Introduction

Introduction Darlene Clark Hine Twenty-five years ago such a session would have been impossible, for southern women's history as such was still in the birthing stage. The pubUcation of Anne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady was, however, a harbinger of things to come. It has since been reissued with a new afterword by the University of Virginia Press and is weU worth the re-reading. Now as we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century it is fair to say that southern women's history has come of age. The impressive scholarship of our and my generation of white and black women historians has created an intellectual revolution of far-reaching significance, not only in southern history but in United States history as a whole. Whether you subscribe to Marxist theory, structuralist /functionaUst theory/Freudian psychoanalytic theory, ferninist theory, or call yourself a postmodernist, aU would agree that intersectionaUty concepts of compounded identities, oppositional consciousness, and multiple reaUties have forever altered the landscape of southern historiography. One area of interest and concern to me has been the impressive work in black women's history. Within a span of thirty months at least a dozen monographs, biographies, and anthologies of original articles by and about black women will enrich our arsenal of revolutionary scholarship. Due to appear in 1996 are books by Stephanie Shaw on black professional women workers; Tera Hunter on black working-class women Atlanta washerwomen, in the post-Reconstruction South; Brenda Stevenson on black and white women in famines of antebeUum Virginia; and NeU Irvin Painter on Sojourner Truth. In addition, there are two anthologies: Discovering the Women in Slavery, Patricia Morton, editor; and More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, editors. Two recently published monographs include Susan Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired about black women and the black health movement, and Kent Anderson LesUe, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849-1893. To these riches wiU soon be added Deborah Gray White, Black Woman Clubs and Feminism; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Black Women and the Woman Suffrage Movement; Wanda Hendricks, Black Women in Illinois; and Linda Reed, Biography of Fannie Lou Homer. © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) ...