Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Gender and American Culture) [Paperback]

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 28, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0807845965 | ISBN-13: 978-0807845967

Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism.

According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore examines an unfamiliar world in this groundbreaking study, the world of middle-class, educated black women at a time that was one of the nadirs of black-white relations in America. With the Supreme Court's affirmation of legal segregation, Southern black men found themselves disfranchised and excluded from politics. Black women filled that vacuum, Gilmore argues, making a place for themselves as ambassadors to the white community, and as activists on behalf of blacks, and bequeathing to their descendants a heritage of resistance that culminated in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this extensively documented history, Gilmore (history, Yale) examines the imposition of legally mandated segregation in North Carolina at the turn of the century. African Americans had achieved significant success in that state even after the end of Reconstruction, and Gilmore argues that the incentive for segregation emerged in response to that success and to the stirrings of independence of white women. Vilification of the black man as a sexual predator served the twin purposes of banishing potential economic and political rivals and restricting the ambition of white women. This focus, however, provided an opportunity for black women to play the role of "diplomat" to the white community and to initiate a small measure of interracial cooperation. Although well written, this densely detailed exposition will attract a chiefly academic audience.?Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 410 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (August 28, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807845965
• ISBN-13: 978-0807845967
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #65,550 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Activism
  • #6 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Civil Rights
  • #34 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > History

More About the Author

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, PhD, University of North Carolina, 1992, is Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, and Director of Graduate Studies of the African American Studies Department for 2009-2010. She offers seminars in the history of the New South and race and gender. She is editor of Who Where the Progressives?, co-editor of Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, and author of Gender and Jim Crow: Women and Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, which won the James A. Rawley Prize in 1997 for the best book in race relations and the Frederick Jackson Turner for the best first book by an author, both given by the Organization of American Historians. It also won the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, awarded by the Southern Association for Women Historians and Yale University's Heyman Prize. Her latest book is Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (2008), which was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and named a Notable Book of 2008 by the American Library Association.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best of Genre March 8, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This book is a mind-blower. It reveals the history of white supremacy as an overt political campaign in the South in the early 20th century, and more importantly the roles that middle-class black women self-consciously assumed in this very dangerous cultural arena. Historins talks a lot about ideology and race and agency, but this is the most skillful and convincing account that I've read: by examining how people - men, women, poor, rich, black, white - understood and tried to shape their worlds, Gilmore recasts a significant portion of American history, and made me re-examine my assumptions about racism and gender and politics. I'm working towards my graduate degree in history, so I've had to read scores of books that cover similar ground - and this is the by far the best treatment that I've read. Also very important: Gilmore is an excellent writer - this text reads as smoothly and as compellingly as a novel. Can't recommend it highly enough.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An innovative look at post-Reconstruction race relations March 1, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

As Gilmore writes (p. 1) in Gender and Jim Crow, "since historians enter a story at its end, they sometimes forget that what is past to them was future to their subjects." And with regard to black optimism, potential and opportunities during Reconstruction, African American "subjects" looked forward to a future of encouraging possibilities, as African American males had real political power and influence within the Republican and populist parties, which courted their votes. These men and women believed that race as a social classification would decline in importance in favor of class. Yet just as the hopes of Agrarian radicals were thwarted by the harsh the realities of the two-party system, so too were the dreams of Reconstruction-era blacks crushed by the resurgence of white supremacy and the systematic attempts by whites to disenfranchise the Negro. Gilmore presents this tale of high hopes and shattered dreams in her first chapter, "Place and Possibility."
Gilmore's story is one of perseverance among the increasingly subjugated blacks of North Carolina after Reconstruction ended, in particular, the struggle of middle class black women to maintain power, dignity and to some degree control over their lives and communities. By the 1890s, the ugly image of white supremacy showed its face, as white men fought a successful battle to disenfranchise black men through the instrument of fear, that is to say, fear for the safety of white women from the ravenous clutches of Negro rapists. As Gilmore details, this sexually based contrivance branded black men as beasts and drove them from the political realm.... Articulate black women, she argues, stepped in to this cultural and political vacuum to coordinate with whites (especially white women and Northern reformers) to get social services and to work for "racial uplift," especially through church and voluntary associations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Gilmore notes that these types of activities were not as exposed to white restrictions or ire as overt political action, and thus helped to assure some success by these middle-class black females. It seems that black women could travel within certain community and political circles that were no longer open to their male counterparts.
Gender and Jim Crow is an innovative look at post-Reconstruction race relations, in that the chief actors in Gilmore's tale are women. It nicely dovetails with Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, in that we see similar examples of the creation of Jim Crow and the use of sexual fears to bolster notions of white supremacy as well as white political solidarity. While Kantrowitz shows that Ben Tillman was representative of many of white Southerners of his day, I am unconvinced that Gilmore's subjects are as representative. Her geographic realm is limited to one state of the Upper South, North Carolina; did black women carve out a similar role for themselves in the Deep South as well? Additionally, her cast of characters is quite small, and perhaps we are drawn to these women and their story because of its very exceptionalsim and not its typicality. Nevertheless, Gilmore's new and nuance perspective is groundbreaking and valuable in that we see the era of Jim Crow from a viewpoint previously unexplored. Read more ›

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Original, important, a tad romantic May 26, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Gilmore breaks new ground on many fronts that will interest social historians of race and political historians. She uncovers the myriad arenas in which black women and white women pursued "politics" outside the formal arenas of electoral institutions. She also reveals the surprising coalitions formed across racial lines and the mindset of an upper-South State on the eve of disenfranchisement. Gilmore's writing flows smoothly, as other reviewers have noted, but at times becomes overwrought and sentimentalized in a way that makes it sometimes tedious and sometimes aggravating to stay with the text. She's become captured a bit by her characters and sources. But this is a small criticism in the context of an overwise pathbreaking study that's well worth the read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Political and Economic Shaping of Gender October 27, 2004

By Sean

Format:Paperback

The influence of sex on gender is often mistakenly emphasized to the extent where sex and gender are seen as synonyms. Historian Glenda Gilmore challenges this aberration by re-examining the formative years of Jim Crow in North Carolina through the lens of middle-class African American Women. Her reconstruction of this assumed history demonstrates acute gender construction divergences based on race, class, and political circumstance. Gilmore discloses the dynamics of marriage, education, and above all hope in shaping the differences between gender construction between African Americans and whites.

The racial progressive momentum of Reconstruction shaped educated African American women to uplift their race in an effort to improve living standards for their families, to open up opportunities for their sex for both races, and to change white attitudes toward African Americans. By accenting the life of Sarah Dudley Petty, Gilmore reveals that her activism as a "feminist" and as an African American was in contrast to white women because black women were responding not just to patriarchy but to racial oppression as well.

A famous example of how African American women hoped to uplift their race was through their work in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). This organization provided North Carolina's black women "their best hope for building strong communities and securing interracial cooperation" (32). The WCTU became a point of mutually for both whites and blacks to improve community and gender equality. When black men voted, white women welcomed and sought out the activism of black women.... Political circumstance for both groups of women afforded a glimmer of hope that racial equality was possible, however, as the political circumstance changed under the swagger of Jim Crow, white WCTU members got behind white supremacist leaders.

Gilmore explains the gender construction of whites was molded by the downturn of the economy. As hard times hit the North Carolina agrarian economy, a reconsideration of racial parity was in quick demand and an explicit white supremacy movement formed to deny blacks all their gains from Reconstruction. The "New White Men" sought to reconstruct racial interaction, and in particular sexual interaction between the "races." Gilmore reveals that the White New Man effectively created a social norm where it was no longer a demonstration of strength to have sex with a black woman but a sign of weakness. New White Men now expected white women, across class boundaries, to be wholesome and chaste in order to maintain racial purity. In turn, white women began to hold the White New Men culpable for the previous generation that allowed for racial miscegenation transgressions. Such feminine pressure as expressed by the Waddell women, Gilmore argues, supplied the once ineffectual Alfred Waddell to lead the Wilmington slaughter and take the office of mayor of Wilmington.

In the dismal days after the successful drive of disenfranchisement, when black men were pushed out of the political and civic circles, Gilmore fruitfully uncovers how black women advanced the condition of African Americans. African American women took charge amidst the Progressive Era in women's missionary societies and volunteer organizations. Gilmore demonstrates how Black women were instrumental in the rise of the welfare state and how they shrewdly created political ties with white women in un-seemingly apolitical fashion.

Gilmore's reconstruction of a microcosm of race relations in North Carolina has revealed the larger aggregate on America's shameful history of racism and misogyny. Her emphasis on social influences of gender construction affords an effective analysis of the vibrancy of agency within the seemingly impregnable shadow of structure. Read more ›