Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived.

Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage.

Contributors:

Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis

Gary T. Edwards on Amanda Trulock

Dianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher Terry

Sarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie Caraway

Rebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil War

Elizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gatson Bates

Kelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton Frontier

John Kirk on Sue Cowan Morris

Marianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert Cornish

Rachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia Parler

Loretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark

Michael Pierce on Freda Hogan

Debra A. Reid on Mary L. Ray

Yulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby Jones

Sonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas