In 1988, participants in the First Southern Conference on Women’s History lamented the neglect of southern women’s history. Despite the rich research possibilities suggested by Gerda Lerner’s 1967 biography of the Grimké sisters of South Carolina and her documentary history, Black Women in White America (1972), and by Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (1970), only a small fraction of the new scholarship on women’s history dealt with the South.1 Women’s historians focused largely on women in the North, while southern historians examined race, but not gender, and African American historians generally ignored black women in their analyses
