Cherisse Jones-Branch - Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times

Arkansas Women

THEIR LIVES AND TIMES

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EDITED BY

Cherisse Jones-Branch and

Gary T. Edwards

2018 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones-Branch, Cherisse, editor. | Edwards, Gary T., editor.

Title: Arkansas women : their lives and times / edited by Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary T. Edwards.

Description: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia Press, [2018] | Series: Southern women: their lives and times | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058463 | ISBN 9780820353319 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820353333 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820353326 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: WomenArkansasHistory. | WomenArkansasSocial conditions. | ArkansasHistory.

Classification: LCC HQ1438.A8 A75 2018 | DDC 305.409767dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058463

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CHERISSE JONES-BRANCH AND GARY T. EDWARDS

SONIA TOUDJI

KELLY HOUSTON JONES

GARY T. EDWARDS

REBECCA A. HOWARD

MICHAEL PIERCE

SARAH WILKERSON FREEMAN

MARIANNE LEUNG

DIANNA OWENS FRALEY

JOHN A. KIRK

ELIZABETH JACOWAY

YULONDA EADIE SANO

DEBRA A. REID

LORETTA N. MCGREGOR

MICHAEL B. DOUGAN

RACHEL REYNOLDS

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As coeditors, we extend a special thank-you to the fourteen contributors to this volume. Everyone was extraordinarily busy, but each generously provided their expertise and, far more important, their patience over the years necessary to complete this project. We are further grateful for the support from Arkansas State Universitys Department of History. We could not wish for better colleagues. We have been most fortunate to work with, first, Nancy Grayson, former editor in chief, and later, Lisa Bayer, director, at the University of Georgia Press; they believed in this project and assured us time and time again that our experiences as coeditors were perfectly normal. We also thank Katherine Grace La Mantia for sending emails to keep us on task. A heartfelt thank-you is due to Elizabeth Payne, coeditor of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Bond, coeditors of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, for their guidance and support as we completed our volume on Arkansas women. And, finally, we thank our families: Ezell Branch III, and Michelle and Cacie Edwards for their love and encouragement. You have made this journey worthwhile.

Arkansas Women

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CHERISSE JONES-BRANCH AND GARY T. EDWARDS

Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times explores womens experiences across time and space from the states earliest frontier years until the late twentieth century. This collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, many of whose stories have not been told, with a particular appreciation of how gender and race informed and nuanced the times in which they lived.

Arkansas, a mid-South state, is both racially and geographically diverse. Carved out of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Arkansas was granted statehood in 1836. Its history encompasses the stories of people from prehistoric times until the twenty-first century. Native American cultures like the Quapaw, Caddo, and Tunica had long been present in Arkansas, and their interactions with Europeans resulted in an intercultural exchange that enhanced colonial sojourns around the state and buttressed the economies of both groups until Native Americans were removed from Arkansas in the 1820s and 1830s. The story of intercultural exchange in Arkansas was also informed by the presence of black and white women. Women assumed key roles in building both communities and institutions in the state. With the support of progressive governors and legislators, women were granted the right to vote in Arkansas primary elections in 1917 before women obtained suffrage nationwide. Additionally, through the efforts of such organizations as the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association, Arkansas became the twelfth U.S. state and the second southern one to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.

Like other southern states, Arkansas was invested in the institution of slavery, yet it was only in its second generation by the time the state seceded from the Union in 1861. The bulk of political power, however, resided in the Arkansas Delta where most enslaved African Americans in the state labored. This temporal lag impacted race relations in Arkansas in such a way that led to its becoming an enigma among southern states. Indeed, after the Civil War, as the

The states history is further influenced by its various geographic regions (the Ozark Mountains, the Arkansas River valley, the Ouachita Mountains, the Coastal Plain, and the Delta, which runs along the Mississippi River) and its long-standing reliance on agricultural production, factors that continue to define Arkansass character as a state in the twenty-first century. Many of the chapters in this book reflect this rural geographic diversity while some reflect Arkansass modest urban landscape, found primarily in Little Rock. Many of these Arkansas women oriented themselves to place by spending significant time out of the state. For some, their travels muted any desire to question the states entrenched status quo. Others, however, were inspired to prod their fellow Arkansans to change and expand their worldview beyond the states stereotypical parochialism.

Like the rest of the nation, Arkansas has witnessed and has been impacted by historical change. Arkansans have suffered losses during every war in which the United States has engaged. They have further been affected by the changes wrought by Jim Crow laws, migration, and the civil rights movement. Yet through all of this, the voices and experiences of Arkansass women, with a few exceptions, have largely remained silent and invisible. Furthermore, the exceptions have failed to speak significantly to the depth and breadth of womens lives in Arkansas in ways that illuminate their complexity, nuance, and interconnectedness across time, state, and region.

The literature about women in Arkansas has grown very slowly since the 1980s. Although archives and repositories around the state are teeming with womens history collections, few of them have resulted in publications about Arkansas women. One of the first volumes to comprehensively explore Arkansas womens stories was Elizabeth Jacoways Behold, Our Works Were Good: A Handbook of Arkansas Womens History (1988). More recently, new monographs have emerged. Among them are Grif Stockleys Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (2005), Stephanie Baylesss