More than Petticoats: Remarkable North Carolina Women, 2nd Edition celebrates the women who shaped the Tar Heel State. Short, illuminating biographies and archival photographs and paintings tell the stories of women from across the state who served as teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists.

The Power of Femininity in the New South demonstrates how the legendary strength and moral authority of the South's "steel magnolias" inspired turn-of-the-century women to move from the parlor to the political arena. With a comprehensive examination of the women's voluntary associations that proliferated in North Carolina between 1880 and 1930, Anastatia Sims chronicles the emergence of women - both black and white - in a political terrain torn between the tyranny of white supremacy and the promise of Progressive reform. She tells how organized women, as they called themselves, came to terms with a sacred cultural icon of the antebellum South - the complex, often contradictory ideal of southern femininity - and how they explored the ideal's possibilities, discovered its limitations, and ultimately transformed it by their own actions.

"This first of two volumes on North Carolina women chronicles the influence and accomplishments of individual women from the pre-Revolutionary period through the early 20th century. They represent a range of social and economic backgrounds, political stances, areas of influence, and geographical regions within the state. Even though North Carolina remained mostly rural until well into the twentieth century and the lives of most women centered on farm, family, and church, Gillespie and McMillen note that the state's people "exhibited a progressive streak that positively influenced women." Public funds were set aside to advance statewide education, private efforts after the Civil War led to the founding of numerous black schools and colleges, and in 1891 the General Assembly chartered the State Normal and Industrial School (later UNC-G) as one of the first publicly funded colleges for white women. By the late 19th century, as several essays in this volume reveal, education played a pivotal role in the lives of many white and black women. It inspired their activism and involvement in a world beyond their traditional domestic sphere"--

It is so obvious that to treat people equally is the right thing to do," wrote Gertrude Weil (1879–1971). In the first-ever biography of Weil, Leonard Rogoff tells the story of a modest southern Jewish woman who, while famously private, fought publicly and passionately for the progressive causes of her age. Born to a prominent family in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Weil never married and there remained ensconced--in many ways a proper southern lady--for nearly a century. From her hometown, she fought for women's suffrage, founded her state's League of Women Voters, pushed for labor reform and social welfare, and advocated for world peace. Weil made national headlines during an election in 1922 when, casting her vote, she spotted and ripped up a stack of illegally marked ballots. She campaigned against lynching, convened a biracial council in her home, and in her eighties desegregated a swimming pool by diving in headfirst. Rogoff also highlights Weil's place in the broader Jewish American experience. Whether attempting to promote the causes of southern Jewry, save her European family members from the Holocaust, or support the creation of a Jewish state, Weil fought for systemic change, all the while insisting that she had not done much beyond the ordinary duty of any citizen.

“A tour de force . . . a top-notch study of a powerful couple negotiating the shifting socioeconomic world of the New South and early corporate America.”—Journal of American History Separately they were formidable—together they were unstoppable. Despite their intriguing lives and the deep impact they had on their community and region, the story of Richard Joshua Reynolds and Katharine Smith Reynolds has never been fully told. Now Michele Gillespie provides a sweeping account of how R. J. and Katharine succeeded in realizing their American dreams. From relatively modest beginnings, R. J. launched the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which would eventually develop two hugely profitable products, Prince Albert pipe tobacco and Camel cigarettes. His marriage in 1905 to Katharine Smith, a dynamic woman thirty years his junior, marked the beginning of a unique partnership that went well beyond the family. As a couple, the Reynoldses conducted a far-ranging social life and, under Katharine’s direction, built Reynolda House, a breathtaking estate and model farm. Katharine and R. J. Reynolds “is an engrossing study of a power couple extraordinaire . . . Telling us much about an unusual relationship, Michele Gillespie also provides a new way to understand how the post-Reconstruction New South elite helped construct business structures, social relations, and racial hierarchies. The result is an important addition to our understanding of the industrial South in the North Carolina Piedmont heartland” (William A. Link, author of The Paradox of Southern Progressivism). “Ms. Gillespie uses Katharine’s life and work as a kind of prism through which to view the prejudices and predilections of Southern culture in the 1910s and 1920s.”—The Wall Street Journal