Sisters and rebels : a struggle for the soul of America / Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Includes bibliographical references (pages 607-667) and index.

Introduction -- "Southerners of my people's kind" -- "Lest we forget" -- "Contrary streams of influence" -- "The inner motion of change" -- "Far-thinking...professional-minded" women -- "A clear show-down" -- "Getting the world's work done" -- "Writing and New York" -- "Kok-I-House" -- "The heart of the struggle" -- Culture and the crisis -- Miss Lumpkin and Mrs. Douglas -- "Heartbreaking gaps" -- Radical dreams, fascist threats -- Sisters and strangers -- "At the threshold of great promise" -- Wilderness years -- Expatriates return -- Endings.

Three sisters from the South wrestle with orthodoxies of race, sexuality, and privilege. Born in late nineteenth-century Georgia, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. Their father was a member of the KKK; the older girls performed at rallies celebrating the 'Lost Cause.' While Elizabeth remained in the South, Grace and Katharine, moved by liberal Christianity and emboldened by the YWCA, became impassioned activists for social justice and groundbreaking progressive writers. In bohemian Greenwich Village and not-so-bluestocking Northampton, Massachusetts, they helped to forge a tradition of left-leaning, antiracist, and feminist dissent, while powerfully asserting their identity as Southern women. Distinguished historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall places these ordinary yet extraordinary women in the center of American intellectual history, and explores how each sister came to different understandings of race, gender, and the South; committed, albeit in radically different ways, to remaking the region as a place they could continue to call home.

English