Sarah Wilkerson Freeman (EDT), Beverly Greene Bond (EDT) Tennessee Women

Annotation

Including suffragists, civil rights activists, and movers and shakers in politics and in the music industries of Nashville and Memphis, as well as many other notables, this collective portrait of Tennessee women offers new perspectives and insights into their dreams, their struggles, and their times. As rich, diverse, and wide-ranging as the topography of the state, this book will interest scholars, general readers, and students of southern history, womens history, and Tennessee history.Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times shifts the historical lens from the more traditional view of mens roles to place women and their experiences at center stage in the historical drama. The eighteen biographical essays, written by leading historians of women, illuminate the lives of familiar figures like reformer Frances Wright, blueswoman Alberta Hunter, and the Grand Ole Oprys Minnie Pearl (Sarah Colley Cannon) and less-well-known characters like the Cherokee Beloved Woman Nan-ye-hi (Nancy Ward), antebellum free black woman Milly Swan Price, and environmentalist Doris Bradshaw.Told against the backdrop of their times, these are the life stories of women who shaped Tennessees history from the eighteenth-century challenges of western expansion through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles against racial and gender oppression to the twenty-first-century battles with community degradation. Taken as a whole, this collection of womens stories illuminates previously unrevealed historical dimensions that give readers a greater understanding of Tennessees place within environmental and human rights movements and its role as a generator of phenomenal cultural life.