This is the first of two volumes that together explore the diverse and changing patterns of Georgia women’s lives. Volume 1 focuses on eighteen Georgia women between the founding of the colony in 1733 and the end of World War I. What has it meant for women of different social classes and ethnicities to be a Georgia woman? Does identification with a particular state shape a woman’s identity in any significant way? Do women’s experiences cast a new light on the first two centuries of Georgia’s history, as the colony became one of the United States and part of the...

Coosaponakeesa, also known as Mary Musgrove Matthews Bosomworth, represents one of the few women from colonial Georgia about whom any records survive.¹ Unfortunately, the documents of her bitter and constant battles with British officials at home and abroad paint her as a discontented and bothersome female who incessantly pestered the authorities with her petitions for land and financial compensation. In these accounts, she comes across as a selfish Indian trader who epitomized the stereotypically negative attributes of that occupation. In late twentieth-century scholarship, however, sympathetic scholars portray her as a mixed-blood woman maligned by white English aristocrats and exploited for...

Georgians love a good story, and Georgia has produced numerous skilled storytellers and many marvelous stories, some fictional, some historical. Georgia has also produced stories that seem to hang in a mythical realm somewhere between fiction and history. The stories of Nancy Hart rest in just such an ambiguous place. Hart, nicknamed Georgia’s War Woman, is herself no historical fiction. The stories of Nancy Hart’s Revolutionary War exploits, however, have a much more tenuous hold on historical reality. They did not appear in print until at least fifty years after the Revolution, and many Georgia historians of the nineteenth century...

“No one could possibly claim,” explained Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton in his 1901 preface, that Elizabeth Johnston and her Recollections “are of very wide historical or even biographical interest.” She did not fire any cannons or act heroically, did not enter into personal correspondence with great figures, did not influence the course of political events, or in any other way stake a claim to historical significance. Indeed, Eaton felt the need to justify her significance through her progeny, reeling off a long chain of her descendants who had subsequently held weighty positions in Canada—chief justices and Supreme Court judges,...

The fugitive slave Ellen Craft (ca. 1826–1891), and her husband William (1824–1900), achieved prominence in their day for a daring and audacious escape from bondage. Not sheltered under cloak of darkness, but instead concealed by a clever disguise and the distractions of holiday revelries, the Craft s tell of fleeing from slavery in Macon, Georgia, in December 1848. To reconstruct Ellen Craft’s story is to rely considerably on secondhand accounts rather than primary ones. With the exception of her jointly written memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), and letters that more closely resemble copybook exercises than...

In a book dedicated to documenting the lives of Georgia women, it may seem impertinent to wonder whether Frances Anne Kemble (Fanny) and her daughter, Frances Butler Leigh (Fan), were Georgians in any meaningful sense of the word. The State of Georgia itself does not seem certain. The historical marker commemorating “Famous Butler Authors” on the site of the family’s Butler Island plantation ignores Fanny Kemble altogether, even though that she was, by virtue of her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1863), the most influential of the family’s writers. Instead the marker pays homage to her daughter,...

Like thousands of African American women of her generation, Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia.¹ Like only a very few of them, she seized her freedom and joined the Union army, and like no others, she left a memoir of her experience, which makes her story compelling. However, Taylor was emblematic of her generation as she, like hundreds of thousands of black Georgians, was liberated by the Civil War, an experience both profound and transformative. Although she would later settle in the North, Taylor’s first thirty years were spent in antebellum, wartime, and Reconstruction Georgia—times of...

Eliza Frances Andrews was the sort of educated, witty, and independent, stereotype-flouting woman about whom historians seem to love reading and writing. It is easy to be engaged by someone who notes casually that a friend “has lent me Les Miserables in French, which I read whenever I can steal a moment during the week.” She was also blissfully condescending and a miserable racist. Her published works are filled with the bitterness that a generation of southern whites held toward all things Yankee; when she edited and published her wartime diary in 1908 there was little forgiveness, even forty-three years...

One day in the middle of February 1849, a wealthy man named David Dickson rode across his fallow fields. As he rode he spotted a young female slave, whom he knew, playing in a field. The girl not only belonged to his mother but was also a great favorite of hers. Deliberately, he rode up beside her, reached down, and swung her up behind him on his saddle. As one of her descendants remarked years later, “that was the end of that.” The enslaved girl’s childhood ended as Amanda America Dickson’s life began, on the day when her forty-year-old father...

In most respects, Mary Ann Harris Gay was an ordinary nineteenth-century white southern woman. Born on a slaveholding farm in Jones County, Georgia, in 1829, she never married, survived wartime hardships, and endured a succession of personal tragedies during her eighty-nine long years. But she also published three books over her lifetime, and from the time of the Civil War until her death in 1918 her contemporaries hailed her as a true daughter of the South. She was celebrated for her heroism on the Civil War home front, her single-handed fundraising efforts to rebuild her war-ravaged church, her ever-present Christian...

On November 21, 1922, women packed the galleries of the U.S. Senate. Delegations from every women’s organization in Washington were present for the introduction of the first woman senator ever. Hale and hearty despite her eighty-seven years, the new junior senator from Georgia rose to give her maiden speech. “The women of the country have reason to rejoice,” she asserted. “This day a door has been opened to them that never was opened before.”¹ Rebecca Latimer Felton had particular reason to rejoice, and to be proud, for not only was she the first woman to be so honored but, equally...

Mary Latimer McLendon, like her better-known sister, Rebecca Latimer Felton, was raised in an antebellum slaveholding Georgia family and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War as a loyal daughter of the Old South. Following the war and Reconstruction, both Latimer sisters reacted to the end of their antebellum society by creating a new identity for white women of the New South that included bringing women into politics as both activists and voters. Mary, unlike her sister, however, did not move into politics through her role as political wife, but rather as a consequence of facing the challenges of urban...

Mildred Lewis Rutherford, club woman and educator, was one of the bestknown Georgian women of the early twentieth century.¹ Mostly remembered for her work in the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), Rutherford was also an educator and principal of one of the state’s most prestigious schools for young women. Through these and other activities, Rutherford took part in the redefinition of race relations and southern white womanhood in the New South era.² Although her justification of secession, support for the Confederacy, and romanticization of slavery might make Rutherford appear out of touch with early twentieth-century modernity, she played an...

In 1868 seventeen-year-old Nellie Peters wrote in her school diary, “I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke and found that life was duty.”¹ Adhering always to this precept, Nellie Peters Black, Georgia’s “Pioneer Club Woman,” dedicated her life to organizing women for the purposes of benevolence, self-improvement, and social and civic reform. Holding powerful positions in both the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) and the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia, Black became one of the most public examples of white female activism in early twentieth-century Georgia. Whether working to expand the Episcopal church...

In one of the great changes that occurred after the Civil War, southerners, both black and white, redefined the meaning of education in the South. Southern states had not created public educational systems during the antebellum period; hence, possession of an education was reserved for the elite who could afford tutors and private schools. In the antebellum—and postbellum—South education signified power. After the war, however, the freedpeople made education a priority and essentially forced the issue of public education, for children of all races and all classes.

In the dissemination of education, women played an enormous role. During...

Corra White Harris is largely forgotten now, although an Evangelical publishing house did publish her most famous book a few years ago under a slightly modified title. For the first decade of the twentieth century, however, she was a famed reviewer of books for the Independent magazine of New York City. In 1910 she published her “circuit rider” stories between hard covers and for the next decade was one of the most famous popular storytellers in the magazines of the middle-brow middle classes, with a readership that spanned the continent despite the fact that she was an unapologetic southern partisan...

Ask any Girl Scout, “Who was Juliette Low?” and she will almost always respond, “Founder of the Girl Scouts of the United States.” More than eighty years after her death, Low remains a beloved figure among present and former Girl Scouts. The movement she launched in Savannah in 1912 has become an integral part of American girlhood; since its inception, more than fifty million girls and women have joined its ranks.¹

Low was one of the most influential women ever to live in the state of Georgia, yet few people outside the Girl Scouting community recognize her name, and many...