“Can the Sistas Get Some History, Too?”

This chapter explores black women’s contributions to southern history by considering the contours and nuances of their intersectional experiences. Jones-Branch highlights the scholarly production that has resulted from often overlooked or underutilized resources that reveal the intellectual labor in which black women engaged as they carefully assessed and navigated the temporal and geographical times in which they lived. This chapter, additionally, demands a reconceptualization of the ways that southern women’s history has been understood and consumed in the absence of black women’s stories. It challenges historians to generate scholarship that elucidates black women by mining and reading traditional archival sources against the grain and creatively finding ways to access nontraditional sources to augment their voices.

Testing Our Mettle

Women’s and gender historians over the last fifty years have not suffered such physical horrors, they have had to test their mettle on the scholarly battlefield of Civil War history. Theirs has been a dogged fight in the face of strong opposition to gendering a past that traditional historians and popular culture have preferred to see as great battles between great men. Newer narratives that document white and black women’s resistance, agency, and leadership across the Civil War era have been contesting these persistent older accounts for several decades. Recently historians have disputed traditional historical approaches even more rigorously by exposing the cultural meanings of gender during wartime. They have argued that ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped Civil War political discourse, social thought, and economic roles, ultimately affecting the nature and outcome of the war. The Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH) has long been a critical locus of support for these scholars who are challenging outmoded conceptions of the Civil War that emanate from within the profession and across mainstream American media and culture.

Introduction

The movers and shakers of women’s history during second-wave feminism and particularly the women who in 1970 founded the Southern Association of Women Historians (named changed to Southern Association for Women Historians in 1985) would likely be surprised as well as delighted by current strides by feminist scholars and women historians in all fields, but particularly in Southern women’s history. They doubtless would be amazed by how the Southern academy has adapted to female colleagues and feminist agendas. Coming together to celebrate fifty years of organizational outreach, mentoring and fundraising, prize-giving and programming, it is a good time not only to take stock of this organization but also to reflect on our academic enterprise: the challenges and accomplishments at half a century. The fluidity and dynamism of women’s history has combined with important recognition of race and region within the American past, and twenty-first-century shifts take into account the dramatic acceleration of historical revisionism.

A Place Where Women Can Feel Valued, or Why Academic Professional Associations Matter, Especially for Women

The Southern Association for Women Historians provided a place where female historians felt validated and emboldened. By providing this space over the past five decades, the SAWH has done two important things: advance the careers of individual female historians while encouraging, developing, and legitimizing the study of women’s history. In the process, as several of the scholars here have already suggested, the SAWH helped transform the historiography of the American South by refocusing many of the lenses that scholars have trained on the past. The history of the SAWH demonstrates the crucial role that scholarly professional associations play in shaping fields of knowledge and the careers of individual scholars.

Present at the Birth of a New History

The Southern Association for Women Historians, has had two missions since its founding in 1970: to support women historians and to promote women’s history. From the beginning, it was an inclusive and non-hierarchical organization that took mentoring colleagues seriously and built structures within the institution to foster it. The SAWH welcomed men as members, along with those scholars who worked independently or outside of the academy, and supported graduate students. The SAWH’s collaborative model and conferences provided a robust forum for the exchange of ideas. At the SAWH’s founding, it was a caucus within the Southern Historical Association. In 1975, however, members decided to form a separate organization that could better foster its model of activism for women and women’s scholarship. It worked to increase women members in the SHA and to shape that organization’s rules and culture to be more accepting of women and their scholarship. In addition to this activism, the SAWH helped birth the now robust field of southern women’s history.

Barbarians at the Doorbell

The great expansion of southern women’s history over the past half century has been fueled in part by the pioneering archival projects launched by women historians and other specialists. The SAWH became an important resource for growing the field. A steady parade of researchers stopped begging for crumbs and began to make demands. These demands included marching right up to the front door, ringing the bell and refusing to be denied entry. The creation of guides to resources and digitization of resources has advanced research and writing in the field, transforming archives and collections by including issues of gender and sexuality. By applying pressure in a positive and persistent manner, historians and activists pushed ahead and created the framework for southern women’s history to flourish. A flurry of handbooks emerged as librarians and archivists began to amass new materials, to prepare and publish elaborate and engaging guides, and to connect these resources to larger questions in the field. The project of southern women’s history has become less about gatekeeping and more about raising the roof. The SAWH stimulated the expansion of southern history to be collected, recorded, sorted, and digitized for public consumption.