Mary Weaks-Baxter

women working for victory in World War II

We are a college at war

Carolyn Perry

Discusses the lives of major southern women authors and presents an example of the work of each.

Colonial to Contemporary

Southern Women's Writing

Catherine Forslund

Christine Bruun

We Are a College at War weaves together the individual World War II experiences of students and faculty at the all-female Rockford College (now Rockford University) in Rockford, Illinois, to draw a broader picture of the role American women and college students played during this defining period in U.S. history. It uses the Rockford community’s letters, speeches, newspaper stories, and personal recollections to demonstrate how American women during the Second World War claimed the right to be everywhere—in factories and other traditionally male workplaces, and even on the front lines—and links their efforts to the rise of feminism and the fight for women’s rights in the 1960s and 1970s.

Women Working for Victory in World War II

We Are a College at War

In this stimulating study, Mary Weaks-Baxter views the Southern Renaissance, 1900--1960, from a fresh perspective. Many writers in the South began consciously to create new myths for the region at the start of the twentieth century, and these myths, Weaks-Baxter argues, reframed southern history and culture. Instead of being rooted in the plantation culture that had provided inspiration for nineteenth-century southern writers, the new literature was inspired by "southern folk," the common people who farmed the earth and whose values derived from Jeffersonian agrarianism and democracy. By glorifying the yeoman farmer -- a figure not only central to southern life but revered throughout the country -- southern writers confirmed the essential Americanness of southern literature and the southernness of American history, creating a viable myth that offered the promise of renewal and purpose. To illustrate how the myth crossed racial, gender, and economic boundaries as well as geographic lines, Weaks-Baxter examines the work of diverse writers, including Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Olive Dargan, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Jesse Stuart, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Harriette Arnow, William Faulkner, and the Nashville Agrarians. Their portrayals of the lives of common men and women provided hope for all Americans as they were confronted with industrialization and the Great Depression. Weaks-Baxter shows how this agrarian fable led to a new Southern Renaissance in the late twentieth century, influencing the work of contemporary southern writers such as Madison Smartt Bell, Wendell Berry, Alice Walker, Dori Sanders, and Bobbie Ann Mason. With lively arguments and keen insights, Reclaiming the American Farmer will change the terms of discussion about the Southern Renaissance and southern literature in general as it demonstrates how mythologies can unify southerners as well as divide them.

The Reinvention of a Regional Mythology in Twentieth-Century Southern Writing

Reclaiming the American Farmer

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

The History of Southern Women's Literature

Floyd C. Watkins

John T. Hiers

Collects a wide variety of interviews given by the author over the years, including television appearances and conversations with other writers

Mary Weaks-Baxter

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