Elizabeth Anne Payne - Böcker

Volume 1 of Mississippi Women enriched our understanding of women’s roles in the state’s history through profiles of notable, though often neglected, individuals. Volume 2 explores the historical forces that have shaped women’s lives in Mississippi. Covering an expanse of time from early European settlement through the course of the twentieth century, the essays in the second volume acknowledge the state’s diverse cultural and physical landscapes as they discuss how issues of race, gender, and class affected women’s lives in various private and public spheres.Essays on the state’s early history focus on such topics as Choctaw and Chickasaw women’s influence on Native American society and tribal councils, daily life for free black women in slaveholding Natchez, and the efforts of white Protestant women to establish churches on the frontier. Several essays cast new light on legal concerns, including two on the pivotal Married Women’s Property Act of 1839, while other essays examine the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on women’s lives.The boundaries of race and gender in Jim Crow Mississippi are explored through an essay on the women of the mixed-race Knight family, notably the educator, nurse, and missionary Anna Knight. Women’s experiences with rural electrification, consumerism, civil rights activism, social and service clubs, and feminism are among the other twentieth-century topics addressed in the essays. Volume 2 concludes with an essay on storytelling and remembrance that centers on the family of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (and Mississippi native) William Raspberry.

In 1937, at the invitation of Myrtle Lawrence, a white sharecropper and organizer for the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), two Vassar graduates visited Poinsett County, Arkansas, to document the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Louise Boyle, photographer, and Priscilla Robertson, scribe, lived with the Lawrences for ten days and photographed the Lawrence family in their sharecropper shack, at STFU meetings, and in their jobs as cotton pickers. The pair took side trips to document two cooperative farming communities in the Mississippi delta, Dyess and the Delta Cooperative Farm. Unlike the famous photographs that emanated from the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, Louise Boyle was not a government employee. Far from being a propagandist for the New Deal, Boyle’s images demonstrate a social conscience aimed at raising public awareness of the catastrophic effects of New Deal farm programs on Black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers. In the eighty images reproduced here, Boyle represented Arkansas sharecroppers as dynamic, multifaceted, eager for upward mobility, and curious about the outside world. Boyle and Robertson created a body of work based on a woman-centered feminist ethic that forms the core of this book. Authors Elizabeth Payne and Janet Allured use STFU records, letters of and interviews with the three women, correspondence and interviews with STFU organizers, and newspaper accounts to provide the context and interpretation for Myrtle Lawrence’s stint as an agricultural labor organizer and Boyle’s remarkable photography.