In every age and in every culture there have been women who challenged the prevailing gender prescriptions and struck a nerve, resulting in waves of either change or repression. In this book Elizabeth Hayes Turner draws on a multiplicity of sources part of the great outpouring of works in the field of women's history that has emerged in the past 40 years to bring together in one volume the history of conservative, moderate, and even radical women's groups. The book demonstrates how women and men from different racial and economic backgrounds not only weathered but also shaped the political and cultural landscape of the New South. Employing women's history, gender analysis, and race and class studies, the book shapes this accumulated scholarship into an interpretative overlay that takes southern women and men from the ravages of one war to the opportunities of another.