Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Introduction

1 Introduction Ann Short Chirhart and Kathleen ann Clark    Chirhart and Clark This is the second of two volumes that together explore the diverse and changing patterns of Georgia women’s lives. Volume 2 focuses on eighteen Georgia women from the turn of the century to the 1980s. In volume 1, black and white women responded to dramatic changes in their lives during and after the Civil War by grasping new opportunities as professionals, writers, and leaders of organizations . Volume 2 follows this trajectory and illuminates how women during the twentieth century expanded these opportunities, pushed for equality, promoted various organizations and political interests, pioneered women’s roles in some professions, and became leading writers and artists in the nation. They grappled with the ongoing oppressions of Jim Crow, the legacy of two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War era, the civil rights movement, the growth of conservatism, and the memory of the Civil War. How do these women’s stories help us understand these dramatic changes in the South and the United States? How did modernity change their lives as communities fragmented, secularization spread, urbanization grew, industrialization expanded, and equality and rights were demanded? Did Georgia women of different classes, races, and religions who lived during these tumultuous years share a common identity? Did they see themselves as distinct from other southern women or women across the nation? Or in the age of modernity, did they come to see themselves as part of national movements, professions, and ideas? These questions, among others, are at the heart of these volumes, and the essays explore the lives of women often marginalized, frequently misunderstood, and always at the forefront of change or the preservation of tradition at the local, state, and even national level. As these essays show, Georgia women participated in the dramatic changes in the twentieth century in multiple ways. Their work for reforms, literature and the arts, and professional choices were shaped by broader movements for suffrage, equal rights for African Americans, and new opportunities for professional work, artistic expression, and political activism, among others, but they 2 Chirhart and Clark engaged these changes in complex ways. For some, the past represented restrictions on what they could do or say, virulent racism in Jim Crow, and domination by men in the home and public life. For others, Georgia’s past retained a conflicted hold on them as they sought to preserve what they believed were the best of traditions in the home, Christianity, and society at the same time that they, too, challenged dominant perceptions of women’s roles. Withal, Georgia women, black and white, were vital actors in the myriad changes that transformed families, communities, and society in the South and the nation at large over the course of the twentieth century. For many Americans, World War I marked the nation’s shift to modernity in the twentieth century. Yet most Georgians were already confronting transformations in their social order. Georgians who were alive September 22–24, 1906, never forgot the Atlanta Race Riot, when white mobs tore through Atlanta’s streets attacking blacks and black businesses. At least twenty-five blacks were murdered and possibly more. For black women like Lugenia Burns Hope, it marked the destruction of already fragile interracial ties; hope for shared efforts to improve African Americans’ status dimmed considerably when “their white friends had planned to destroy them.” For some white women, like Margaret Mitchell, it was a time for lawful white Atlantans to defend themselves against the threats of violence, disorder, and mob rule. For other white women, like Vara Majette, the riot captured distorted power relations between blacks and whites and demonstrated how white patriarchal authority lessened the potential for all women to challenge dependent relations. While distinct in their particular perspectives and prescriptions for change, all three women shared the fear of mob violence and what could instantaneously erupt when the Southern order of class and race was threatened. In the wake of the riot’s days of terror and murder, the event marked shifts in turn-of-the-century Georgia. Atlanta in particular was a site of increased industrialization and urban growth. From a small city formed by the intersection of railroads in 1846, Atlanta hosted a population of more than ninety thousand people by 1900. Twenty years later, more than two hundred thousand people lived there—the largest city in Georgia and the third largest in the Southeast. Called the Gate City, Atlanta embodied New South...