North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times [Hardcover]

Michele Gillespie (Editor)
MICHELE GILLESPIE is a professor of history and dean of the undergraduate college at Wake Forest University. She is also author of Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789–1860 (Georgia) and co-editor of ten books, including North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times (Georgia).

Sally G. McMillen (Editor)
SALLY G. McMILLEN is the Mary Reynolds Babcock Professor of History at Davidson College. She is the author of Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing; Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South; To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865–1915; and Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement.

North Carolina has had more than its share of accomplished, influential women—women who have expanded their sphere of influence or broken through barriers that had long defined and circumscribed their lives, women such as Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, the widow and tavern owner who supported the American Revolution; Harriet Jacobs, runaway slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds, elite women who promoted women’s equality. This collection of essays examines the lives and times of pathbreaking North Carolina women from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, offering important new insights into the variety of North Carolina women’s experiences across time, place, race, and class, and conveys how women were able to expand their considerable influence during periods of political challenge and economic hardship, particularly over the course of the late ninetel³.