Katy Smith

kssmit@unc.edu

Ph.D. Student

Major Field: US History

Other Fields: Women's and Gender History

Advisor: Kathleen DuVal and Jacquelyn Hall

Research Interests:

My dissertation examines the practices of motherhood in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South. White, black, and Native American women in Virginia and the Carolinas viewed motherhood as a composite of multiple roles that ranged from teacher and nurse to farmer and politician. These mothers lived in a cross-cultural landscape in which they used female networks of advice and consolation, broader intellectual currents, and an understanding of their own multifaceted identities to raise their children, largely by their own standards. By constructing, interpreting, and defending their roles as mothers, women in the South maintained a certain degree of control over their own and their children’s lives