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Tennessee Women

Their Lives and Times, Volume 1

Beverly Greene Bond editor Sarah Wilkerson Freeman editor Laura Helper-Ferris editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Georgia Press

Published:15th Feb '09

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Tennessee Women cover

Including suffragists, civil rights activists, and movers and shakers in politics and in the music industries of Nashville and Memphis, as well as many other notables, this collective portrait of Tennessee women offers new perspectives and insights into their dreams, their struggles, and their times. As rich, diverse, and wide-ranging as the topography of the state, this book will interest scholars, general readers, and students of southern history, women's history, and Tennessee history.

Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times shifts the historical lens from the more traditional view of men's roles to place women and their experiences at center stage in the historical drama. The eighteen biographical essays, written by leading historians of women, illuminate the lives of familiar figures like reformer Frances Wright, blueswoman Alberta Hunter, and the Grand Ole Opry's Minnie Pearl (Sarah Colley Cannon) and less-well-known characters like the Cherokee Beloved Woman Nan-ye-hi (Nancy Ward), antebellum free black woman Milly Swan Price, and environmentalist Doris Bradshaw.

Told against the backdrop of their times, these are the life stories of women who shaped Tennessee's history from the eighteenth-century challenges of western expansion through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles against racial and gender oppression to the twenty-first-century battles with community degradation. Taken as a whole, this collection of women's stories illuminates previously unrevealed historical dimensions that give readers a greater understanding of Tennessee's place within environmental and human rights movements and its role as a generator of phenomenal cultural life.

The richness and variety of the voices represented in these essays will be useful in many ways. The breadth of the women’s experiences and the broad span of time their lives touched will ensure the work’s appeal to a wide audience.

* author of In the Shadow of Selma: The Continuing Struggle for Civil Rights in the Rural South *

By focusing on the lives of individual women, known and unknown, over many years, this volume is an important addition to the history of Tennessee and the evolving history of southern women.

* W.K.Boyd Professor Emerita, Duke University *

The authors of these well-researched and gracefully written biographical studies admirably capture the complexities of multitextured lives of diverse women who were often heroines on their own terms. Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Greene Bond have edited an outstanding work, one that makes a major contribution to American women's history, southern history, and especially to the history of Tennessee.

* editor, Black Women in America *

This book makes a major contribution to American women’s history, southern history, and especially to the history of the Volunteer State.


Tennessee Women provides a fascinating look at the lives of women who played public roles as activists, artists, athletes, and executives.

* Tennessee Historical Quarterly

ISBN: 9780820329499

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 33mm

Weight: 662g

480 pages