Arkansas Women ― Their Lives and Times

Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived.

Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage.

Contributors:
Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis
Gary T. Edwards on Amanda Trulock
Dianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher Terry
Sarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie Caraway
Rebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil War
Elizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gaston Bates
Kelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton Frontier
John Kirk on Sue Cowan Morris
Marianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert Cornish
Rachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia Parler
Loretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark
Michael Pierce on Freda Hogan
Debra A. Reid on Mary L. Ray
Yulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby Jones
Sonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas

Cherisse Jones-Branch is professor of history at Arkansas State University. She is the author of Crossing the Line: Women’s Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II and is currently writing a book on rural black women’s activism in Arkansas.

Gary T. Edwards is an associate professor of history at Arkansas State University. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Free University of Berlin and is currently writing a book on the yeomen of antebellum western Tennessee.