ABSTRACT
The history of southern women must take into account the extraordinary complexity and diversity within the gendered worlds women experienced over time. This chapter develops a history that breaks through traditional stereotypes by detailing a range of southern women’s lived experiences, including divergent ethnic histories, religious beliefs, domestic and civic realities, as well as a multitude of cultural expressions. What emerges within the context of the social, economic, and political history of every period is a richly inclusive, albeit divergent, portrait of women who have resided in the southern region of the United States. While commonalities among southern cultures are explored, differences within and between women’s lives are particularly highlighted so that a more comprehensive history is presented that goes beyond the “black–white binary” and other limiting stereotypes (“mistress-and-slave,” the “mammy,” the “belle,” the “hillbilly,” “steel magnolias,” and more recently, the bouffant “redneck”) about the gendered worlds of southern women. This long history must be examined within the ethnic differences that make up the whole of American cultural life, and against the regional distinctions of all geographic areas. Indigenous women distinguished by location and cultural practices, white women differentiated by class, enslaved and free black women with varying life experiences over time, as well as Spanish, French, and other language and cultural groups provided fertile ground for differentiation among women in the southern region. This history begins, of course, before the South even has regional boundaries, or before the United States is formed as one nation, under God. The “frontier” encounters women experienced created social realities that differed among native tribes, and the traditions in Spanish and French settlements influenced English colonists and thereby impacted the women living in the southern regions of what would become the United States.
