Dissertation Information for Joan Marie Johnson NAME: - Joan Marie Johnson
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1997)
ADVISORS: - Brenda E. Stevenson
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Ellen Carol DuBois - Eric Sundquist
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: This wonderful dream nation! Black and white South Carolina women and the creation of the New South, 1898-1930
Abstract: Black and white clubwomen in South Carolina each worked to shape a New South according to their own needs in the early twentieth century. The evidence in this dissertation, including letters, publications, organizational files, newspaper accounts, minutes, and oral interviews of women's clubs' state federations, leaders, and local clubs, shows that their work as clubwomen and as social reformers cannot be considered apart from their sense of place and their negotiation of Southern identity.
White clubwomen in the South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs focused on Southern identity to an extraordinary degree; it pervaded both their literary self-improvement and their social reform agendas. Through literary and historical study, clubwomen embraced the Lost Cause, which was the movement to honor the Confederacy, and they based their social reform agenda in the belief that the Lost Cause was meaningless without prosperity in the New South. Moreover, their focus on Southern identity had profound implications for race relations. Not only did they extend reform benefits to whites only, but through the Lost Cause they also justified and strengthened segregation. Thus their social reform was linked to the Lost Cause which was in turn rooted in the racial ideology of white supremacy. This approach highlights their "conservatism" rather than their "progressivism."
At the same time, black clubwomen fought for their needs to be recognized, particularly through state support for their reform projects. They rejected Lost Cause history which denied them a place in the South, working instead for black history and literature in the schools. African American clubwomen in the South had to assert their rightful presence in the South, through literary and historical studies, through their own reform agenda, and through their presence as respectable women who claimed their rights as Southern citizens also. Black and white clubwomen in South Carolina both fought to stake their claims to Southern identity in the early twentieth century.
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calculated 2008-10-14 17:49:10
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