Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South

The first study to focus on white and black women journalists and writers both before and after the Civil War, this book offers fresh insight into Southern intellectual life, the fight for women's rights and gender ideology. Based on new research into Southern magazines and newspapers, this book seeks to shift scholarly attention away from novelists and toward the rich and diverse periodical culture of the South between 1820 and 1900. Magazines were of central importance to the literary culture of the South because the region lacked the publishing centers that could produce large numbers of books. As editors, contributors, correspondents and reporters in the nineteenth century, Southern women entered traditionally male bastions when they embarked on careers in journalism. In so doing, they opened the door to calls for greater political and social equality at the turn of the twentieth century.

1. Introduction; Part I. Foundations: 2. Reading, literary magazines, and the debate over gender equality; 3. Education, gender, and community in the nineteenth-century South; Part II. Women Journalists and Writers in the Old South: 4. Periodicals and literary culture; 5. Female authors and magazine writing; 6. Antebellum women editors and journalists; Part III. Women Journalists and Writers in the New South: 7. New South periodicals and a new literary culture; 8. Writing a new South for women; 9. Postwar women and professional journalism.

This is the first book to examine women writers in the nineteenth-century South. While popular myths depict the shy and quiet Southern belle, this book demonstrates that Southern women were often politically active and outspoken, and calls into question widespread assumptions about the nineteenth-century South.

Jonathan Daniel Wells is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820–1861 and Entering the Fray: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South. He is a co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, The Southern Middle Class in the Nineteenth Century. He has published several reviews and articles on nineteenth-century America, the Civil War, slavery, gender, politics, class and intellectual life, in journals such as The Journal of Southern History, American Nineteenth-Century History and the Maryland Historical Magazine.