Southern Cultures (Web); Guest Editor: Jessie Wilkerson

Proposals by: 01.12.2019

Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special Fall 2020 issue to mark the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

The editors seek work that examines and complicates the history of women’s suffrage in the South. How does starting from the perspective of women in the region lead us to new questions, narratives, and understandings about women and gender, citizenship, and rights?

The anniversary of the 19th Amendment evokes specific people in particular times and places—rarely in the South. It narrowly emphasizes the vote, when we know that black, brown, and working-class women fought for political and human rights well before and after ratification and that black southern women understood suffrage as part of their battles against lynching and Jim Crow. Across the country, many white women celebrated suffrage with ticker tape parades in 1920 while black women protested their continued disfranchisement, and many southern white women continued to support it.

Taking the centennial as our opening, this issue will explore a range of themes related to women’s rights, activism, and protest in the South. How does a focus on the South complicate the idea of anniversary, which implies remembrance of an achievement? In what ways does it lead us to new historical actors and periodization? What is the longer story of women’s rights in the South, and what is the relationship to civil rights; reproductive rights; workers’ rights; lesbian, trans, and queer rights; indigenous rights; and immigrant rights? What is the state of women’s rights, and how does … read more (Web).