First published 2021
Nell Irvin Painter crosses racial divides to study how identity factors shaped Southern lives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She analyzes the intersection of race, gender, class, and personal experience through detailed portraits of individuals from both sides of the color line. Her six essays focus on figures like Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, a white plantation mistress who became a feminist, and Hosea Hudson, a black Communist organizer. Painter investigates interracial relationships, white supremacist systems, and the brutal physical and mental damage inflicted by slavery. She breaks conventional boundaries between Southern history, women's studies, and African American scholarship. Her methodology combines psychological insights and feminist social science with traditional historical approaches. The book offers readers a nuanced understanding of how individual lives reflected broader social forces in the South.
Genres: history, 20th-century, gender-studies, african-american, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: intersectionality, nuanced-understanding
Setting: South, Southern
Period: 19th Century, 20th Century
264 pages · Kindle Edition · The University of North Carolina Press
Content warnings: racism, slavery