Constance B. Schulz is Professor of History at the
University of South Carolina in Columbia. She is the
author or editor of numerous books, including Michigan
Remembered: Photographs from the Farm Security
Administration and the Office of War Information, 1936-1943.
Elizabeth Hays Turner is
Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas
in Denton. She is the author or coeditor of many books,
including Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and
Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 and Beyond Image and
Convention: Explorations in Southern Women's History
(University of Missouri Press). |
Description: It was
no accident that the Southern Association for Women Historians
enjoys the founding date of 1970. After extended and often
bitter engagement with entrenched sexism in the decades
following World War II, women historians found their voices and
crafted a means by which to be heard. The years between
1970 and 1980 represented a decade of optimism for women who
sought equality in the workplace. Professional women,
professors of history most especially, found hope in
organizations such as the SAWH, created to address issues of
visibility, legitimacy, and equality in historical associations
and in employment.
In Clio's Southern Sisters, Constance B. Schulz and
Elizabeth Hayes Turner collect the stories of the women who
helped to found and lead the organization during its first
twenty years. These women give evidence, in strong and
effective language, of the experiences that shaped their entrée
into the profession. They vividly describe the point at
which they experienced the shift in their lives and in the lives
of those around them that led toward new day for women in the
history profession.
Some found that discrimination followed them like a shadow, and
the pain of those days still remains with them. Others
sought their graduate education in institutions where women were
welcomed and where professors valued their work and encouraged
their success. Yet when they entered the job market, they
found that some employers flatly refused to consider them
because they were women. Lost job opportunities for women
were linked in tangled ways to the prevailing image of women as
less desirable as colleagues, or as intellectually weaker than
their male counterparts.
Through the SAWH, these women were able to make changes from
within the profession. They felt an obligation to help the
next generation of women scholars. In the midst of a
national movement to end sex discrimination through legislation,
to increase women's consciousness-raising efforts, and to
acknowledge the economic realities of women in the workforce,
these women came together to form an organization that could
enable them to have the careers they deserved. This timely
volume will be appreciated by all those who reaped the benefits
for which these "southern sisters" fought so hard.
Available from Amazon
ISBN# 0-8262-1541-6 |
