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1 A Gilded Cage
- Louisiana State University Press
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1. Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 11–33. 2. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 63–89; C. Vann Woodward, A History of the South, ed. Wendell Holmes Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter, vol. 9: Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press and the Little- field Fund for Southern History, University of Texas, 1951), 276–77; William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 427–31; Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women’s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880–1930 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 34–40; Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott , and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1992), 95–118. 1 † A GILDED CAGE Cornelia “Nell” Battle Lewis’s birth on 28 May 1893 in Raleigh, North Carolina , occurred at a crossroads in the state’s history. With the Cotton Mill Campaign and industrialization running full tilt, the myth of the New South subsumed that of the Lost Cause as the state and region’s dominant ideology. The factory and the city, southern intellectuals and businessmen alike glowingly proclaimed, had replaced the plantation as the nucleus of their society. The human toll of this exchange remained virtually unexamined.1 An ascendant elite, the New White Man—skeptical of Confederate hagiolatry , pragmatic, efficient, and often with humble roots and a common touch— had come to town and supplanted the leaders of the previous generation, the Bourbons and Brigadiers. While professing its allegiance to democratic principles , this cadre worshiped at the altar of the Democratic Party, whose hegemony an edgy interracial fusion between the state’s Republicans and a vigorous agrarian Populist Party increasingly imperiled. For a short-lived moment economic issues seemed to matter more to many poor farmers than a rigid devotion to white supremacy. The New White Man ruthlessly prepared to wrest back power by “hollering Nigger” and evoking the specter of black men as de- filers of Pure Southern Womanhood. The disenfranchisement that occurred at the decade’s end would usher in the nadir of Jim Crow and enable the Democratic Party to eradicate much of the progress many blacks had forged.2 Tar Heel women, building on their work in missionary societies, entered a gilded cage 5 3. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 135–63; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Anne Firor Scott, “Women in the South,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 488–92; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 46–47, 58–59; Sims, Power of Femininity, 3–53; Margaret Supplee Smith and Emily Herring Wilson, North Carolina Women: Making History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 187–91; Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 19–26. 4. Armistead C. Gordon, Gordons in Virginia, with Notes on Gordons of Scotland and Ireland (Hackensack , N.J.: William M. Clemens, 1918), 70–71, 148; Special Staff of Writers, History of Virginia, vol. 4: Virginia Biography (New York: American Historical Society, 1924), 3; Clement A. Evans, Conthe public arena in the 1880s and 1890s to exercise their moral authority in support of temperance. Stepping down from their assigned pedestal, many white women encountered for the first time the poor, the diseased, and the tumult of politics as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) fought to mitigate the conditions that fostered alcohol abuse and to dry up the state’s counties and towns. Their “work probably changed their lives a great deal more than [it] changed the lives of the recipients of their beneficence,” southern scholar Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore writes. Black women, too, with an eye toward racial uplift and interracial cooperation, participated in the struggle for temperance. Despite the tension that existed between these two groups, their common goals gave rise to an ephemeral sisterhood. The Democratic Party’s machinations at the century’s close would end that, but “organized...