Why Any Woman: Feminism and Popular Culture in the Late Twentieth-Century South

By Keira V. Williams

Scholars are revisiting the history of feminist activism and organizations, mining it for a revisionist, grassroots gender politics in the South. Why Any Woman advances this line of historical inquiry by focusing on one of the most productive sites of late twentieth-century southern feminisms: popular culture by and about southern women. The nature of popular culture is such that the challenges it poses to the gendered and racial order, for instance, are likely to be consumed—privately, in theaters or at home, alone or with friends or family—by more people than would ever read a feminist manifesto, attend a civil rights demonstration, or lobby a legislator for change. In the cultural desert of the late twentieth-century, pre-internet South, during a time in which there were fewer avenues of activism and organizing, other sources of feminism predominated, and pop culture is where many of us turned for guidance, for role models, and—whether or not we knew it—for consciousness-raising. In a region and during a time of neoconservative backlash in which women’s liberation was under attack, southern women’s pop culture offered a bridge between the second and third “waves” of feminism and a major challenge to contemporary antifeminist forces.

Why Any Woman examines key texts by and about southern women—the play Crimes of the Heart, the novels The Color Purple and Ugly Ways, the films Thelma and Louise and Beloved, the television shows Designing Women and The Oprah Winfrey Show—as a means of understanding the role of regional popular culture in defining and redefining American feminisms as we approached the twenty-first century. Taken as a collective, these texts expand how we think about the whats, wheres, whens, and hows of feminisms in recent U.S. history. "Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me," muses the blueswoman Shug Avery in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Why Any Woman features southerners who, like Shug, rejected and reshaped gender norms, and their stories illustrate some of the ways regional pop culture has been and still is a crucial site of American feminisms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780820365589

Keira V. Williams

KEIRA V. WILLIAMS is Senior Lecturer of History at Queen's University Belfast.

Book preview

Why Any Woman

Why Any Woman

FEMINISM AND POPULAR CULTURE IN THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTH

Keira V. Williams

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2023 by Keira V. Williams

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Williams, Keira V., 1976– author.

Title: Why any woman : feminism and popular culture in the late twentieth-century South / Keira V. Williams.

Description: Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023019356 | ISBN 9780820365565 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820365572 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820365589 (epub) | ISBN 9780820365596 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and mass media—Southern States—History—20th century. | Women’s mass media—Southern States— History—20th century. | Women in mass media. | Feminism— Southern States—Case studies.

Classification: LCC P96.F462 U695 2023 | DDC 305.420975—dc23/eng/20230630

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019356

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION Wrestling with Scarlett

Southern Women, Feminism, and Popular Culture

CHAPTER 1 Keep Living, Daughters

Southern Sisters Ride the Wake of the Second Wave

CHAPTER 2 You Get What You Settle For

Staging Coups against Southern Patriarchy

CHAPTER 3 The Business of Being a Woman

Third-Way Southern Feminism

CHAPTER 4 Change Your Life Television

Oprah Winfrey’s Southern, Neoliberal, Black Feminism

EPILOGUE Just a Southern Girl in a Southern World

Southern Feminist Pop Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to all the usual and gracious suspects (friendly readers, letter writers, snack providers, etc.). I am especially grateful to Kimberly Chabot Davis and Cecilia Konchar Farr, who very kindly shared Oprah transcripts during lockdown when I had trouble accessing them from my home in Northern Ireland. Chapter 4 is heavily indebted to both of you.

I would also like to thank the British Association of American Studies and the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, each of which provided funding for the research in this book.

This one is for Lolly. Everybody needs a twinkie.

Why Any Woman

INTRODUCTION

Wrestling with Scarlett

SOUTHERN WOMEN, FEMINISM, AND POPULAR CULTURE

In 1976, the cable network HBO aired Gone with the Wind fourteen times in one week as part of the first television deal featuring the classic film. Twice a day for seven days, audiences tuned in; an estimated 382,500 viewers, or 85 percent of HBO subscribers, watched at least once during that week. A few months later, NBC got in the game, billing the first basic network telecast of Gone with the Wind, which took place over two nights, as the most eagerly awaited event in television history. The hyperbole was warranted: Nielsen estimated that almost thirty-four million homes watched on both nights, making the film the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network.¹ That November, Carol Burnett’s popular comedy show featured the now-classic sketch Went with the Wind, which parodied the film not just by mocking Scarlett O’Hara’s much-lauded ingenuity, but also by flipping the script to give the enslaved maid Sissy the upper hand in the end—literally, when she slaps Starlett and steals Rat Butler’s famous line about not giving a damn. All told, the mid-1970s Gone with the Wind renaissance was a hit, and the film was a reliable ratings sweep, prompting CBS to acquire the rights in 1978 and air it throughout the following decade.²

With this able assist from Scarlett O’Hara, Lost Cause pop culture surged nationwide in the 1980s. The U.S. Postal Service issued a Margaret Mitchell stamp in 1986 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, and the many media retrospectives of the novel and the film landed the former back onto the New York Times best-seller list for a few weeks. In 1988, native Atlantan Ted Turner, founder of CNN, launched the cable network Turner Network Television (TNT), which showed classic films acquired through his purchase of the back catalogs of Metro Goldwyn Mayer and United Artists. TNT debuted on October 3, 1988, with a performance of The Star-Spangled Banner followed by a showing of Turner’s favorite movie, Gone with the Wind, programming he repeated a few years later for the unveiling of another of his cable channels, Turner Classic Movies.³

This network fare was an extension of Turner’s offerings at the theater he owned at the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta, where, reportedly in response to tourist complaints about the city’s lack of Gone with the Wind- themed attractions, he scheduled the film twice daily. To further satisfy this Old South craving, Turner held a premiere at the Fox Theater in Atlanta to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the film in 1989, part of what the New York Times called a week-long promotional frenzy that included a costume ball, a parade, tours of antebellum homes, star-gazing and memorabilia-hawking.⁴ As more American homes acquired VCRs, the popularity spread beyond Georgia, and Gone with the Wind joined the top-ten video rentals by the end of the decade. Others tried to cash in on this revival; plans to build a Gone with the Wind theme park in Atlanta sparked a bidding war in the early 1990s, although it was never built. In 1991, Charlestonian author Margaret Ripley was chosen by Mitchell’s estate to write the sequel to Gone with the Wind because of her very Southernness and her record of writing best-selling, gardenia-scented novels about the genteel Old South. Critics generally panned Ripley’s sequel, but like all things Gone with the Wind during this era, it sold well after a multimillion-dollar acquisition battle between publishers. Ripley’s Scarlett stayed on the best-seller lists for weeks and was made into a televised miniseries a few years later.⁵

Even as Scarlett the rebellious belle continued her reign as the most famous southern character, feminism was a word one didn’t hear often, at least not in a positive context, in the region in the 1980s. Here in the South, we have a harder struggle, Sharron Hannon, editor of the Southern Feminist, the largest newspaper of its kind in the region, told the New York Times in 1986.⁶ While it was more pronounced in the South, this struggle was nationwide. The rightward sociopolitical turn in the 1980s included what came to be known as the backlash, a concerted effort to turn back the hard-won gains of the feminist movement through repressive policies, defunding, scapegoating, gaslighting, and a heavy-handed discourse regarding gender in American society. A corresponding culture of postfeminism, or the idea that feminism succeeded in the 1960s and 1970s so much that by the 1980s it was hardly necessary, developed and similarly undermined the Women’s Liberation Movement.⁷ As a discourse of containment focused on the ‘pastness’ of feminism, postfeminism dovetailed easily with anti-feminism, as scholars have noted, and the media heavily promoted these concepts.⁸ In 1998, Erica Jong claimed that Time magazine alone had explored feminism’s death over one hundred times in the preceding three decades. One memorable instance was in 1989, in a cover story in which the magazine declared that the feminist superwoman was weary. Is the feminist movement—one of the great social revolutions of contemporary history—truly dead? Time asked. Ask a woman under the age of 30 if she is a feminist, and chances are she will shoot back a decisive, and perhaps even a derisive, no.⁹

Time’s preoccupation with the demise of feminism indicates popular culture’s important role in the propagation of contemporary antifeminist ideas in the final few decades of the twentieth century, as documented by Susan Faludi, Bonnie J. Dow, and others. Some scholars argue that this post-feminist push was even more pronounced in films and television set in the American South. Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee explain that films like Steel Magnolias invoked the region’s general resistance to politicized feminism and helped to establish the genre by facilitating the nonpolitical impulse of contemporary postfeminism.¹⁰ In the South especially, this neo-traditional trend dovetailed with regional gender norms in which, as novelist Gail Godwin wrote in a 1975 issue of Ms., girls found image[s] of womanhood already cut out for them and faced ostracization if they rebelled.¹¹ The Women’s Liberation Movement, according to this line of thinking, either came too late to the South or bypassed the region altogether, leaving its social hierarchies intact and its culture particularly receptive to retrograde images of and ideas about gender.

Coming of age in the inhospitable climate of the 1980s South, then, it’s little wonder that some of us latched onto the example of Scarlett O’Hara. Even though she was a half-century old by this time, Scarlett was a bootstraps belle well suited to this postfeminist backlash. Tara McPherson argues that the Reagan-era resurgence of representations of white southern women in popular culture served to make new modes of southernness more difficult to envision.¹² But it is true that the older model of Scarlett was a liberated woman maneuvering in, and often ruthlessly trampling on, the strict norms of southern society. Scholars have long debated the feminist themes of Gone with the Wind, an argument I will not get into here. Rather, I am interested in the role popular media plays in translating feminism to a broad audience and in generating new forms of feminism. A related, relevant debate concerns audience reception, particularly the idea that readers and viewers are not passive consumers who wholeheartedly imbibe the intended messages of popular culture. Feminist scholars like bell hooks, Jacqueline Bobo, and Kimberly Chabot Davis counter that different demographic groups interpret texts in myriad ways, often offering oppositional, empathetic, and even activist readings of novels, television shows, and films that speak to intersectional experiences and feminist standpoints.¹³

I examine these kinds of claims in regard to specific texts in the subsequent chapters, but suffice it to say for now that while I find the academic debate about Scarlett’s feminism to be robust and worthwhile, to many southern girls and women in the 1980s, the answer was clear. Scarlett was a clever belle who deftly managed men, was indifferent to marriage and motherhood, and ran her own successful businesses. She was, in Donna Tartt’s estimation of the belle stereotype, a Gatling gun dressed in a hoop-skirt, with the moral code of a soldier: Divide and conquer. Feed off the enemy. Employ spies. Attack unexpectedly. Press an advantage. When surrounded, plot; when ambushed, fight. Always look good; never show fear, never show weakness—except, when necessary, to gain a secret advantage. On the parade ground, shoulders back and stomach in. Left, right. Smile to the grandstand; touch pearls, and wave.¹⁴

Scarlett upheld other white southern social standards as well: she was an enslaver, a keen exploiter of incarcerated Black labor, and a ruthless, pathologically self-centered capitalist. For her part, author Margaret Mitchell, who mocked the lavender-and-old-lace-moonlight-on-the-magnolia genre of southern popular culture, was shocked by the public’s reaction to her most famous character, insisting that Scarlett was a psychopath and a far from admirable woman about whom little that was good could be said.¹⁵

Yet Scarlett worship resurged in the 1970s and continued unabated— and not just among racists yearning for the Old South. In the 1980s, she could serve as a compelling counterpoint to other southern white women in popular culture, like Steel Magnolia’s blushing-and-bashful Shelby, the embodiment of the fragile angel who sacrificed her own health and life to be a mother for a few years. None of these women characters are uncomplicated, and they all feature variations of troubling regional tropes. The overt racism of Gone with the Wind morphed into the unremarked on but unrelenting whiteness of Steel Magnolias a half-century later. Riché Richardson notes the American tendency to anoint white southern actors like Julia Roberts, who played Shelby in Steel Magnolias, as America’s Sweetheart, a move which continually invigorates the long-standing exaltation of the region’s white women.¹⁶

Its problematic racial politics notwithstanding, Steel Magnolias now lies atop many feminist film lists online, and subsequent generations of viewers have defended it as not reactionary but rather rebellious. As recently as 2017, a feminist blogger asserted that Steel Magnolias is not just a feminist film—it is THE feminist film.¹⁷ This retroactive designation decidedly ignores the historical contexts of both the popular antifeminism and the available types of feminism at the time that Steel Magnolias came out. Beyond the feminist novels, films, and television shows explored herein, Steel Magnolias was in theaters at the tail end of a decade in which Black feminism, especially in the work of southern scholars, flourished, and, indeed, the film debuted the same year that legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality. Much as the small-town nostalgia of Steel Magnolias calls on vague but familiar stereotypes of southernness, its allocation of the strength of steel to white women and silent servant status to Black women begs the question of what, exactly, fans mean when they deem the film feminist. The simultaneous Gone with the Wind renaissance points to an active desire on the part of media consumers to fantasize in the present about past southern hierarchies.¹⁸

Yet to deem these films wholly un- or antifeminist flattens both the texts and viewers’ experiences of them. Barker and McKee argue that the spate of chick flicks featuring southern white women at the end of the twentieth century—including Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Something to Talk About (1995), Hope Floats (1998), Where the Heart Is (2000), and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)—offers a traditional and often comic backdrop against which to examine the unresolved conflicts generated by the feminist movement.¹⁹ The titular Steel Magnolias call on a specifically southern brand of ladylike feminism in which white women conduct their resistance to patriarchal dominance beneath the veneer of regional etiquette. The beauty parlor in which they frequently congregate is, according to Tara McPherson, a kind of liminal space between public and private, a safe haven for women in which they connect the personal and political.²⁰ They just happen to do so in folksy language, drawling accents, big hair, and sentimental scenes. Each can be viewed as a retrograde feminine stereotype of the southern white woman or, alternately, as a Trojan horse in which to smuggle quasi-feminism below the Mason-Dixon Line. Either way, their whiteness is a core component of their gender politics and their popular reception.

The public, critical, and scholarly debates over Gone with the Wind and Steel Magnolias tap into several historical problems that Why Any Woman explores. What do these mixed reactions tell us about the ambivalence, contradictions, and complications of southern feminism in a region and during an era in which feminism was reportedly dead or was at least in a coma? What other forms of feminism did southern popular culture offer at the time, and how did these forms reflect or refract national gender politics? As feminist texts, what roles did this regional popular culture play as a bridge between waves and types of feminism in the final two decades of the twentieth century?

Like Ms. in its early years, the texts I explore herein were popular lifelines that connected viewers, readers, and consumers with feminist ideas across time, geography, culture, and politics in the 1980s and 1990s.²¹ Through an examination of texts that represent various forms of contemporary southern feminism in the last two decades of the twentieth century, I find that pop culture by and about southern women offered often overlapping and sometimes contradicting feminist politics: liberal and radical, centrist and revolutionary, individualized and intersectional, capitalistic and communitarian. Indeed, I argue that pop culture by and about southern women was a—and when it comes to the media dominance of Oprah Winfrey in the late 1990s, it was perhaps the primary source of contemporary forms of feminism in this era.

Although historians have till recently tended to ignore southern popular culture as not quite meriting scholarly attention, the regional preoccupation with ideas about gender inevitably generates stereotypes that have, in each era, served as shorthand for understanding southern cultures. These stereotypes are powerful enough that one historian claims that the South is as much an evolving set of images as an actual place.²² The most well-known historical representations of the South are of the moonlight and magnolias variety, which was meant to redeem the antebellum South as part of the Lost Cause mythology around the turn of the twentieth century. As in Gone with the Wind, this fictional moonlight was both racialized and distinctly gendered: no figure looked better in it than the mythical southern white lady. In the 1970s, writer Shirley Abbott deemed her not so much a real person as a utilitarian device covering up ugly reality. What makes her powerful is not her own perfection but her ability to mask the imperfections of the world.²³

The white lady thus offered a center of gravity for all manner of distasteful regional mythologies. This pale and perfect figure perhaps reached her height (and her death) in Gone with the Wind as the genteel plantation angels Ellen O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes. As the belle who judged her own bad behavior against these role models, Scarlett O’Hara was their foil. The film, which debuted in 1939 to much fanfare, deployed these women characters to help cement the entwined mythologies of the Old and New South anew for a Depression-era audience. Gone with the Wind, especially the film version (which reportedly made Margaret Mitchell yelp with laughter), looms large over all subsequent representations of the South.²⁴

Yet, as the creator of the most famous female rebel in southern popular culture, Mitchell saw her epic novel as a challenge to southern traditions, even if readers have not. Mitchell mocked critics’ praise of her unintended nostalgic symbolism, and scholars of southern women’s literature have backed her up, arguing that Gone with the Wind is a complicated text featuring gender politics that deromanticized the Lost Cause and especially the stereotype of the southern lady, even as it upheld white supremacy.²⁵ Furthermore, they argue, Mitchell was part of a cohort of subversive southern authors. Linda Tate traces a southern weave of women’s texts spanning the twentieth century that feature unsettling and often rebellious secret selves invisible to the hierarchies of the white male world. In defiance of the tight girdle of regional gendered expectations, explains scholar Janet Gupton, southern women writers have wrestled free to point out the ambiguities and discontentment that the role of the southern lady engenders.²⁶

The various texts produced by southern women like Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Rainey, and Bessie Smith form an unbroken trajectory of resistance that leads from the 1890s directly to the more famous mid-century challenges to regional mythology posed by Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Lillian Smith, Eudora Welty, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, and others who refused to traffic in the moonlight. Yet despite this pop cultural proto-feminism, as well as the vital activism of southern women in the social movements of the 1960s, they continue to play a negligible role in the historiography of the feminist movement.

As recently as 2017, sociologist Wanda Rushing targeted two lingering assumptions in scholarship on the region: that southern feminists are rare or nonexistent and that the Problem South still clings, desperately and ahistorically, to tradition.²⁷ Neither is accurate. This is not to say, of course, that the South has been a hotbed of feminist activism. Given its history as the bastion of traditional oppressive hierarchies in the United States, it’s not surprising that antifeminism in the 1960s and 1970s was strong in the South. Yet recent scholarship indicates that a focus on events like the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) skews the timeline of southern feminism toward its perceived failures. In fact, a closer look at changes in regional gender politics troubles the conventional trajectory and geography of feminist history, not just in the South but also throughout the rest of the nation.

For many years, much of the scholarship on the second wave of feminism in the South has emphasized that while white feminists were keen to seek expanded resources and opportunities for women, many of them still held tightly to certain historical elements of regional gender politics. One woman described this tightrope in Mother Jones Gazette, a publication of the Knoxville Lesbian Collective in Tennessee, explaining that she could hold fast to the parts of traditional womanhood, such as nail polish, while still striving to be whomever and whatever she wanted to be.²⁸ Scholars of this ambivalent version of feminism argue that it was a kind of middle ground, a redefinition of white southern womanhood that combined both regional ideals and national feminist ideologies. In contrast to the hairy-legged, radical, national stereotype, scholars have developed a list of specific descriptors for southern feminists, including velvet hammers and white-glove activists, and adjectives like masked, coded, and stealth have been frequently applied to movements for gender equality and liberation in the region. Evidence suggests that southern women were well aware of what they were doing when they donned these disguises.²⁹

Yet this ladylike feminism was not the only kind of southern feminist activism. Many scholars now emphasize the contextual and contingent histories of women’s liberation, which means, in this case, that southern women faced both a regional culture and historical challenges to a universal sisterhood that made their experiences quite different from those of other women in the nation. Second-wave southern feminism developed early, out of the specific context of Black and white activists’ experiences with each other, not simply out of their experiences of misogyny, sexism, and oppressive gender norms and institutions. Evidence shows that the southern feminist movement predated the national Women’s Liberation Movement and further offered a radical, regional critique of mainstream feminism throughout the 1960s. These experiences between women forged several southern variants of feminism and spawned some of the more famous forms of national feminism. Scholars have challenged ideas of easy southern sisterhood across race and class while showing how different groups nonetheless worked together in struggles for equality and liberation. Many southern activists, writers, and scholars—Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Joyce Ladner, Patricia Bell Scott, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall among them—have long offered intersectional analyses of the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements, finding the tangled roots of both in the regional experiences of Black women.³⁰

There is thus a growing consensus that southern women’s activism was not just part of second-wave feminism—it was also a primary source of it. The South, in other words, was a veritable incubator for the coming revolution in gender roles, and the women of the Civil Rights Movement were also the founding mothers of the Women’s Liberation Movement.³¹ Scholars have argued recently that the flow of feminist ideology and activism was often from south to north, contradicting the usual tale of the backward South in desperate need of external enlightenment.³² Over the course of the Women’s Liberation Movement, this flow continued to replicate itself through the movement of individual activists and organizations and the production and dissemination of feminist scholarship.

The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, had the potential to cause a sea change in representations of southern women for mass consumption via popular culture. Despite years of challenges, however, gendered and racial stereotypes of the region remained potent at the end of the twentieth century. In 1985, sociologists Maxine P. Atkinson and Jacqueline Boles conducted surveys to determine the persistence of the mythology of the southern lady. The required traits, according to both historical and contemporary accounts, were described by these adjectives: simple, good, passive, delicate, innocent, submissive, mannerly, economical, humble, sacrificing, sympathetic, kind, weak, generous, pious, shallow, nonintellectual, hospitable, rich, and calm (not to mention white). Atkinson and Boles found that the image these terms described still abounded in the mid-1980s, albeit on a shaky pedestal and to the psychological detriment of the region’s white women, who felt ambivalent, torn between [their] desire to emulate the true Southern lady and [their] feelings of personal inadequacy for being unable to do so.³³ As Tara McPherson explains in her deconstruction of the lingering Dixie mythology, these were ideologies with reality effects: Whether or not women embraced these ideals, their popularity had material effects in women’s lives, be they black or white, rich or poor.³⁴

In the 1980s, then, even after the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements, not to mention a long history of concerted literary and scholarly attacks on the historical myths of gender in the region, the moonlit lady still haunted white women in the South enough that they reported anxiety over their failure to live up to her angelic standards. The revival of Gone with the Wind and its frequent airing on cable television likely had something to do with this, although that is a bit of a chicken-or-egg question. Were viewers obsessed with the Old South because of the film, or did they consume the film because they were obsessed with the Old South? Either way, the Old South and its attendant gendered mythology performed considerable cultural work and sold increasingly well in the Reagan era.

Although the 1970s were known for political television shows like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and One Day at a Time, most network fare was decidedly less controversial a decade later, and those shows that were set in the South, like The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, generally featured stereotypical gender and class roles in a decidedly whitewashed region. Just as the Lost Cause mythology at the turn of the twentieth century was popular for sociopolitical reasons that had little to do with antebellum historical reality, these representations of the South in the 1980s served a similar purpose: to keep traditional images at the forefront to both mask and forestall social changes in the region. Indeed, rather than proof of the nonexistence of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the rising prevalence of southern gender stereotypes in 1980s popular culture can be seen as a reaction to it.³⁵

At the same time, as the Reagan rollback and its attendant retrograde representations reigned, scholars have found that some southerners came to exercise a much quieter but more effective ‘feminism’ in the final two decades of the twentieth century, resulting in an improving situation for women well below the Mason Dixon line.³⁶ This feminism took several forms: academic, via the formation of women’s studies programs and departments in southern universities and the publication of works of feminist theory; activist, as southern women participated in actions as individual as escorting patients at abortion clinics and as collective as attending marches for reproductive and gay rights in Washington, D.C.; and political, as women lobbied at the state and federal levels for laws regarding equal protection, anti-discrimination, reproductive rights, violence against women, and LGBTQ rights. Despite its status as the birthplace of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, studies of feminism in the South in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly complicate the overwhelming narrative of backlash and regional backwardness in the late twentieth century.³⁷

Indeed, the study of southern feminisms over the course of the century challenges the ways we generally characterize feminist history. Traditionally, feminist history has been allocated into the first (1840s–1920), second (1960s and 1970s), and third (1990s) waves of organized feminism, divided by decades of ostensible lulls in activism. According to this linear narrative, each wave left unfinished business to its activist daughters, who took up the mantle and pushed the agenda forward in an ever-progressing trajectory, albeit at different paces in each era.³⁸ But for the past two decades, scholars have been filling in the gaps, challenging this proclivity to periodization, arguing that it skews the historical understanding in favor of the movement’s most recognizable leaders, collapses the second wave into whiteness, and obscures the laborers behind an unbroken march of continuous, if sometimes conflicting, feminist challenges.³⁹

Significantly, as Kimberly Springer argues, the waves model has the capacity to drown types of feminism that do not conform to this historical model.⁴⁰ Notably absent from the conventional narrative is the wide-ranging and intersectional activism of women—especially southern African American women—in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Feminist theory flourished in 1970s activism and in the 1980s through publications by southern Black women, and this timing also troubles the traditional trajectory of feminist history.⁴¹ The waves model is thoroughly entrenched in scholarship and historical memory, but it is woefully inadequate, glossing over conflict as well as cooperation between different feminisms at any given time in U.S. history

As even a brief review of southern feminisms in the second half of the twentieth century indicates, it is not just the presumed historical trajectory of feminism that does not seem to apply to the South but also its typology. Nancy Hewitt explains that the waves model posits ever-more radical, all-encompassing, and ideologically sophisticated movements, a narrative that does not withstand scrutiny and ignores the variety of feminisms in each historical era.⁴² Early feminist activities in the South, such as the women’s strike at the SNCC headquarters in Atlanta led by Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, were not white-gloved campaigns of moral suasion. Rather, they featured radical tactics and critiques of the gender hierarchy in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement and labor movement. In a recent review, Carol Giardina—a prominent feminist who started the first Women’s Liberation Movement group in the South in the 1960s—argues that the most radical elements of the movement were forged early in the region, primarily by Black women with experience in civil rights struggles.⁴³ Within a few years, multiple forms of feminism developed across the South.

Thus, the ever-more-radical trajectory and