New Encyclopedia Volume 13: Gender

Entitled Gender, the 13th volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, came out in April. Like its 12 predecessors, each published by the University of North Carolina Press, Gender has the goal of updating scholarship with new and improved entries from the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published in 1989.

Envisioning an encyclopedia around the concept of gender posed intriguing challenges. “Our main goal,” according to coeditor Ownby, “was to show the ways a generation of good scholarship on gender issues has changed the way we think about the South.” Topics that have become crucial in Southern Studies became the subjects of new entries. Much of the best new scholarship uses the lens of gender to rethink older questions. As series editor Charles Reagan Wilson states in his introduction, “This volume charts ways that men and women have had differing experiences of manhood and womanhood.” The volume has new articles on topics like antimiscegenation laws, the politics of respectability, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the Scottsboro Boys, the capture of Jefferson Davis, paternalism, Bubba, Lottie Moon, the myth of matriarchy, manly independence, NASCAR, visiting, single mothers, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the blues, and “I Am a Man!”

While entries on emerging topics might attract the most attention, other entries chart the gendered components of some of the most crucial elements of Southern cultural life. “Southern historians have put gender on the map,” according to coeditor Nancy Bercaw. “Over the past 30 years, they’ve shown us how gender is central to understanding key moments in the history of the South and the nation.”

The encyclopedia covers these new ways of thinking about slavery, agriculture, the Civil War, emancipation, racial segregation and desegregation, citizenship, industry, religion, the civil rights movement, poverty, and education. The book has entries discussing various definitions of family life and sexuality, and new entries on various forms of politics join older but updated entries on feminism and antifeminism, suffrage, and voting rights activists. Other entries track the roles gender issues have played in the ways Southerners express themselves through autobiography, literature, humor, photography, and foodways. Entries on gender issues among American Indians, Hispanics, Appalachian people, whites, and African Americans note the intersections of race, diversity, and region.

The editors say they could have added the phrase “and gender” to almost any topic in Southern Studies and made it an entry. As Bercaw and Ownby state on page 1, “This collection of encyclopedia entries is fairly large, but it could be far larger, because one can find gender components in virtually any element of human life.” The volume, with Walter Anderson’s drawing of Adam and Eve on the cover, is available now.