Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Finding Evidence of Women’s Lives

Women in the South have used their home gardens for sustenance or beauty, civic engagement or friendly competition, protest or refuge – and sometimes even all of the above. In our recent book, Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Cultural Reflections on the Garden, 1870-1970, my co-author Judith Page and I explored the ways that twelve women used the garden as key elements in their art or their writing, both published and private. We included the well-known writer-gardener Eudora Welty but also women who deserve to be better known like Welty’s fellow Mississippian writer Margaret Walker, native plant enthusiast Caroline Dormon and folk artist Clementine Hunter in Louisiana, and Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer and painter Corinne Melchers in Virginia.

How can we learn about achievements in gardening when so few landscapes survive past the gardener’s lifetime? What sort of evidence can be found in archival documents as well as in literature and art? Our fascinating and often surprising research experience leads us to ask: what are we creating or salvaging that will enable later generations to explore our lives?

This talk could be tailored to history clubs, garden clubs, libraries, or other groups interested specifically in gardens or more generally in Southern history or archival research methods.

Speakers Expertise:

Elise Smith received her M.A. from Vanderbilt and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, both in art history, and she is now retired after 37 years at Millsaps College. In addition to a number of journal articles, she has written or co-authored five books. The first two focus on individual artists, the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Lucas van Leyden and the late 19th-century British painter Evelyn De Morgan. The next two, co-authored with a literary scholar at the University of Florida, Judith Page, explore the garden as a personal and professional space for British artists and writers, from the 18th through the early 20th century. Their third book, just out in January, is titled Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Cultural Reflections on the Garden, 1870-1970.