Arkansas Women

Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived.Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage.Contributors:Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard LewisGary T. Edwards on Amanda TrulockDianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher TerrySarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie CarawayRebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil WarElizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gatson BatesKelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton FrontierJohn Kirk on Sue Cowan MorrisMarianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert CornishRachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia ParlerLoretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps ClarkMichael Pierce on Freda HoganDebra A. Reid on Mary L. RayYulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby JonesSonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas