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

Introduction

xv Introduction —jacquelyn dowd hall This book is a tribute to a scholar who has changed the way we see the past. Since 1970, when her first book, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics , 1830–1930, launched the modern study of southern women’s history, Anne Firor Scott has pursued a stirring project: making the invisible visible , teaching us to hear the unheard.1 In so doing, she has driven home the simple yet transformative point that we can never understand the history of the American South while ignoring half of its people. Likewise, Scott and the younger scholars who followed her have reversed what we used to call the “New Englandization” of women’s history: the tendency to generalize from the experience of white, middle-class women in the Northeast. In place of that partial history, we now have an efflorescence of scholarship on women throughout the country and on women whose lives were shaped as much by class and race as by gender. “Contingency is everything,” Anne Scott likes to say, crediting timing and luck for her wonderful career (though I think she would admit that pluck figured as well). She was born on April 24, 1921, right after women won the vote. She grew up in Athens, Georgia, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Georgia in 1941, just in time to walk through the doors that opened to women during World War II. Two events in particular propelled her on her way. First, she landed a job with the National League of Women Voters. That post taught her what organized women could do. It also introduced her to a group of surviving suffragists who exemplified the progressive female reform tradition she would bring to visibility in her first book. The second providential encounter was a date with Andrew (Andy) MacKay Scott, a brash young man, a navy pilot during World War II, who issued an invitation on the spot. “Come marry me and go to Harvard,” he said, to which she responded, “You can’t be serious.” Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History, directs the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. jacquelyn dowd hall xvi His return volley was “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” Twenty-three years later, Anne dedicated The Southern Lady to him. “Sene te nihil,” she wrote, although, of course, when she had to go on without him after his death in 2005, she did, with courage and grace.2 While Andy pursued a Ph.D. at Harvard, Anne studied under the famous Oscar Handlin at Radcliffe College. “Sink or swim” summed up Handlin’s approach to mentoring. But he paid serious attention to her, and “that attention was of the utmost importance.” Too proud to sink, Anne swam.3 By the time she finished her course work, her husband was ready to pursue his career. Following him from place to place, she had three children over the next eight years. She also found time by 1958 to complete her dissertation, “Southern Progressives in the National Congress , 1906–1916.” The Scotts settled in Chapel Hill when Andy began teaching in the political science department at the University of North Carolina. After a short stint in the UNC history department, where she began researching southern women in earnest, Anne answered a call from Duke to fill a vacant position until a suitable candidate could be found.4 That suitable candidate apparently never materialized, and Anne Scott eventually became the W. K. Boyd Professor of History and the first woman to chair the Duke history department. In her dissertation on southern Progressives, Scott kept “stumbling over women,” but she lacked the confidence or the framework to include them in the story.5 First in an article published in 1962 and then in The Southern Lady, she brought those women from the margins to the center of Progressivism in the South and placed them in a narrative that swept from the antebellum period to the eve of the Great Depression. More books and gemlike essays followed, establishing Anne Scott as southern women’s history’s preeminent scholar.6 When Scott and I coauthored a historiographic essay on southern women in 1987, we were amazed at how thoroughly the men who controlled southern history had ignored women before The Southern Lady appeared and my generation of feminist graduate students burst through the university’s...