Elizabeth Smith

Ph.D. Student
eps@unc.edu

Major Field: US History and Women's History

Other Fields: Women's Studies

Advisor: Jacquelyn D. Hall

Research Interests:

"River Queens:  Disorderly Women and Reconstruction Politics in Memphis and New Orleans, 1865-77"

Historians of the nineteenth-century South now regard slavery as in part a system of sexual control.  Similarly, we understand the rape myth and lynching of countless blacks in the century’s final decades as circumscribing the sexual behavior not only of African Americans of both sexes but of white women as well.  What then of Reconstruction, the liminal period between emancipation and Redemption, between slavery and the rape-lynch scenario?  From the newspapers of the era, we know that many conservative white southerners feared that, by losing political control of their region to Republicans, they had also lost control of the South’s social order.  Similarly Republicans, who were embattled at best, proclaimed that their leadership offered the only bulwark against the crushing return of past inequities and lost opportunities.  Deviant women of both races seemed to embody this chaos.  Some were prostitutes, some sought sex with younger men.  Some killed, some fought.  Many drank, and many more were too interested in frivolous fashions.  What these disparate women shared was their usefulness to the press.  By publicizing these instances of female deviance, partisan editors across the South accomplished two goals.  They disseminated a new system of sexual regulation based on discursive shaming; at the same time, they discredited their political opposition as unequal to the task of social control.