The Japonicas, Banksia, Lamarque, and Cherokee roses bloomed as usual in the late spring of 1861 alongside wild white lilies in their first glory, and the beautiful but possessive wisteria. Soon the cotton blooms would make their first appearance, and if, like Caroline Porcher, one stood far enough away from the labor and sweat that brought them forth, it was possible to appreciate the beauty of the fruit of the hibiscus plant. In the time after the Civil War, Porcher's husband recalled how much she had admired “the beauty of the cotton field” and enjoyed “the white blooms on the first day that turned red the next before falling off.”1 From their perch as members of South Carolina's slaveholding and ruling class and with the screening distance of power and privilege, Caroline and Frederick A. Porcher had the luxury of contemplating cotton blossoms and cotton fields, like Japonica roses,...
The Women's Fight: A Coda
THAVOLIA GLYMPH is professor of history and law at Duke University, faculty research scholar in the Duke Population Research Institute, and affiliate of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She is coeditor of two volumes of the documentary series Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 and author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). She is past president of the Southern Historical Association, an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and a member of the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, the editorial board of the Working Class in American History Series, University of Illinois Press, and the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She serves on several journal editorial boards and the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors. Her work has been featured on NPR, PBS, and the BBC, and in the New York Times, Slate, and the PBS documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. She served as a historical consultant for the documentary Mercy Street and the film Harriet.
Thavolia Glymph; The Women's Fight: A Coda. Labor 1 May 2021; 18 (2): 83–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-8849616
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