Unlikely dissenters: white southern women in the fight for racial justice, 1920-1970

Abstract

Between 1920 and 1970, a small but significant number of white women confronted white supremacy and the segregationist system in the American South, incontrovertibly contributing to its demise. Using the 1954 Brown decision as a pivot, Unlikely Dissenters examines and compares two generations of white women who spoke out against Jim Crow while remaining deeply attached to their native South. For many white women reformers, the struggle for African American civil rights was linked to their own complex process of personal emancipation from gender norms. As part of the white community, southern white women felt guilt as members of the “oppressor” group. Yet as women in a patriarchal society, they were also “victims.” This paradoxical double identity forced them to develop a special brand of activism that combatted white supremacy while emancipating them from white patriarchy. In this book, Anne Stefani shows how their unique grassroots community-oriented activism functioned within—and even used to its advantage—southern standards of respectability.