Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930

Abstract

Joan Marie Johnson has brought a new angle of vision to bear on southern women of the early twentieth century. While historians such as Anne Firor Scott, Elizabeth Hayes Turner, and Marsha Wedell have explored women's organizations in southern cities, Johnson uses clubwomen within the towns and cities of South Carolina as a laboratory for focusing on the construction and meanings of southern identity for white and African American women. What emerges is a dual history of two parallel yet separate umbrella groups, the state's Federation of Women's Clubs (SCFWC) and its African American counterpart, the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (scfcwc). To be sure, both groups of clubwomen came from elite backgrounds and showed a literary bent—they read books and presented reports. Yet Johnson's exploration emphasizes the differences in their identity and group experiences. Claiming that white elite women saw their southern identity linked to the Lost Cause, the author stresses the overlapping membership of white women's clubs and the local chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Here her primary examples are Louisa and Mary Poppenheim, wealthy Vassar-educated sisters in Charleston who belonged to both organizations.