Sallie Stockard: Adversities Met by an Educated Woman of the New South by Carole Watterson Troxler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sallie Stockard: Adversities Met by an Educated Woman of the New South by Carole Watterson Troxler Susan Schramm-Pate Sallie Stockard: Adversities Met by an Educated Woman of the New South. By Carole Watterson Troxler. (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2021. Pp. xxvi, 373. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-86526-492-2.) Sallie Stockard: Adversities Met by an Educated Woman of the New South is a masterfully crafted biography of the first woman to earn a degree from the prestigious University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Carole Watterson Troxler relies on firsthand documentation in the form of personal interviews with some of Stockard's friends and relatives, over thirty beautifully reproduced photographs, newspaper articles, and census records—cited in more than six hundred endnotes—and Stockard's memoirs, which are included as a chapter at the end of Troxler's biography. Troxler describes her subject as "an ambitious, well-educated, and hard-working American woman who lived from 1869 to 1963" (p. xix). She argues that Stockard "sprang from independent yeoman farmers and never abandoned that identity" (p. xxiv). In her book Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott argues that when teaching biographical historical methods, it is important to remember that gender is better understood as a social construct rather than as a biological fact. Troxler collapses this dichotomy, using the life and times of Sallie Stockard to illustrate that there were "a number of gates which women in [Stockard's] culture did not pass" and beyond which many women today still struggle (p. xxiv). Inspired by feminist theory, the book details the gatekeepers who blocked women's access to higher education. Empowered by her mother and inspired by her grandmother, Stockard enrolled in a college preparatory department to become a teacher. In 1897 she earned a degree from Guilford College. Stockard also received early encouragement from the educational innovator Edwin A. Alderman, the president of UNC who aimed to recruit women for the university's new coeducational venture. However, Stockard struggled at the "gates" of the state's flagship institution. Although she earned a degree from UNC in 1898, she received "no acclaim" for her accomplishment, and she was "excluded from the class photograph and public ceremony" (p. xxi). [End Page 790] Troxler chronicles not just Stockard's life and times but also the adversities she encountered at these gates as she bucked societal norms that "bound women to secondary and subservient functions" associated with hearth and home (p. xxiv). Throughout the chapters of the book that chronicle Stockard's travels from the South to the West and Northeast, Troxler demonstrates Stockard's talent for self-promotion at a time when women rarely took credit for their feminist convictions. However, Troxler also shows that Stockard did not actively engage in the fight for women's rights; instead, she details her subject's personal experiences and people's reactions to them during her lifetime. This approach locates Stockard's place in a "matrix" of the "expansion of women's rights" that many women who seek personal autonomy still experience today (p. xxv). Troxler points to both the tragedies and the triumphs of Stockard's life from her birth in post–Civil War Alamance County, a rural corner of the North Carolina Piedmont, to her self-imposed (yet unintended) exile from the region, an event that Stockard described as rendering her "a stranger elsewhere" (p. xix). Stockard benefited from her early encounters with "Yankees" and likeminded Quakers, Presbyterians, and Methodists, who laid the foundation for higher education for women in the late nineteenth century. Pennsylvania Quakers had settled communities in Cane Creek Valley, where Stockard grew up, during the eighteenth century. Many in the region sympathized with the Union during the Civil War and expressed anti-Confederate attitudes. The book chronicles Stockard's roots in the Reconstruction-era South. In Stockard's own memoirs, she described the history of her home community as "a trail of historic animosity, between the Tories and the Whigs, the Quakers and the Presbyterians, the Abolitionists and the slaveholders, Republicans and Democrats, the Carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux Klan" (p...