OXFORD, Miss. – American history is full of stories about
women and their accomplishments, but until 1970, most of
those stories were told by men. That’s when Anne Firor
Scott’s landmark book “The Southern Lady” added a woman’s
touch and launched an entirely new academic discipline.
Scott, W.K. Boyd Professor Emerita of History at Duke
University, is both honoree and featured speaker for this
week’s 32nd Annual Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium
at the University of Mississippi. “Writing Women’s History:
A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott” starts at 8 a.m. Wednesday
(March 19) at the E.F. Yerby Conference Center and
concludes Thursday. The free event pays homage to a woman
who, in the process of writing history, made history
herself.
“She is kind of the mother of women’s history,” said
Elizabeth Payne, co-planner of the event with fellow
history professor Sheila Skemp. “She dived deeply into the
archives and pieced together the daily lives of a group of
women who had not been studied before: white Southern
women.”
The research began as Scott’s dissertation at Harvard
University. It ended as “The Southern Lady” (University of
Chicago Press, 1970), a book that took form during the
Womens’ Rights Movement of the 1960s.
” ‘The Southern Lady’ was a product of my considerable
curiosity about these women of whom hardly anybody seemed
to have heard,” Scott wrote for the History News Network
Web site. “I had no notion that the result would be seen as
a new way of studying the past, and as inaugurating a major
historiographical shift.”
Although the conference features Scott and her work, many
other aspects of women’s history are to be discussed by a
diverse group of women historians. Among the 10 speakers
scheduled are Crystal Feimster of the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, who is to speak on “Rape and the
Civil War”; Darlene Clark Hine of Northwestern University,
discussing “Black Women in White in South Carolina During
the Jim Crow Era”; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard
University, speaking on “A Quilt Unlike Any Other:
Rediscovering the Work of Harriet Powers”; and Deborah Gray
White of State University of New Jersey, who is to lecture
on “The Million Mom March: The Perils of a Colorblind
Maternalism.”
“The Porter Fortune History Symposium is one of the major
annual events on our campus,” said Joseph Ward, chair of
the Department of History. “That this year’s symposium
takes place during Women’s History Month and features
public lectures by a large number of leading scholars of
American women’s history makes it especially significant.”
The symposium also provides the perfect complement to
events hosted by the Sarah Isom Center for Women’s Studies,
said Mary Carruth, center director.
“We were so impressed with the symposium’s plenary
lecturers that we decided to adopt all 10 of them as our
2008 Women’s History Month speakers,” Carruth said. “Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich’s presentation on Harriet Powers will truly
honor the spirit of Women’s History Month.”
Ulrich, Harvard’s 300th Anniversary University Professor,
is likely to be of particular interest to quilters. During
the Revolutionary War era, a black woman named Harriett
Powers crafted the two quilts that are among the best-known
textiles in American museums. Ulrich plans to discuss
Powers’ quilts, which are on display at the Smithsonian
Institution and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
“The significance of Powers’ work for women’s history is
largely unexplored,” Payne said. “We have a lot of quilters
in the area, and I think this lecture and person will
appeal to them.”
Scott is to deliver the closing address at 7 p.m.
Thursday.
Among other revelations, Scott’s writings explode the idea
that white plantation mistresses led an easy life, Payne
said.
“One of the things that came out of her work was that
plantation mistresses did a lot of work,” Payne said. “They
oversaw the garden, often cared for sick slaves and even
took care of slave children who were too young to go to the
field. Southern white women married young and had babies
every other year. So the myth about white plantation
mistresses just sitting on the porch drinking tea is based
in fantasy.”
Digging through personal papers, Scott found those stories
and told them. And in the process, she added a feminine
dimension to how American history is recorded.
“Women were written about as mothers, wives and how their
public lives went,” Payne said. “Personal papers and the
structure of their daily lives weren’t considered relevant.
So the whole texture of the South looked different after
Anne Scott’s work.”
The Porter L. Fortune Jr., History Symposium began in 1975
as an annual conference on Southern history. In 1983, it
was named for Porter L. Fortune Jr., chancellor emeritus,
to honor his contributions to the event’s success. Previous
sessions have examined topics such as the Southern
political tradition, childhood, religion and the role of
gender in shaping public power.
For more information, go to
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/history
or call the Department of History at 662-915-7148. For
assistance related to a disability, call 662-915-7148.