Pauli Murray

Lee Smith

Alice Walker

Rayna Green

Anne Braden

Margaret Rose Gladney

Sara Evans

Lee Robinson

Lee Howard

Ellen Stein

Kathy Gleason

Lillian Smith

Jeanie Thompson

Jo Ann Robinson

Ann Deagon

Wendy Watriss

Joy Elvey Lamm

Cynthia Washington

Virginia Rudder

Jeanne Ormond

Sean Devereux

Mary Frederickson

Priscilla Parish Williams

Birthalene Miller

Len Stanley

John Florin

The time has come, Lillian Smith wrote in 1962, for women to risk the "great and daring creative act" of discovering and articulating their own identity. Three years later, Southern women of a younger generation, fortified by the skills and self-respect earned in the black civil-rights movement, issued the first manifesto of a new feminism. Their words landed with explosive force, setting off cultural reverberations which have shaken the lives of men and women alike. A little more than a decade after that, this issue of Southern Exposure began to take form. Its creation has taken us back into history and deep into the meaning of our own lives. As we set out to understand the situation of Southern women, we found ourselves "in search of our mothers' gardens." We found ourselves naming an experience we share across the generations. "So many of the stories that I write," Alice Walker discovered, "are my mother's stories." To speak in our own voices, we had first to give expression to a "promise song" that has been there all along.

Generations Women in the South

This compelling volume offers the first full portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Smith devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing experience for all its people--white and black, male and female, rich and poor. Her best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killers of the Dream (1949), an autobiographical critique of southern race relations that angered many southerners, including powerful moderates. Subsequently, Smith was effectively silenced as a writer. Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume. Arranged chronologically and annotated, they present a complete picture of Smith as a committed artist and reveal the burden of her struggles as a woman, including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling. Gladney argues that this triple isolation--as woman, lesbian, and artist--from mainstream southern culture permitted Smith to see and to expose southern prejudices with absolute clarity.

Letters of Lillian Smith

How Am I to Be Heard?

Lisa Hodgens

Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, andexcerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers thefirst comprehensive collection of her work.

A Lillian Smith Reader

Margaret Rose Gladney

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