Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America

by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Overview

Winner of the 2020 PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the 2020 Summersell Prize, a 2020 PROSE Award, and a Plutarch Award finalist

“The word befitting this work is ‘masterpiece.’ ” —Paula J. Giddings, author of Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin were raised in a culture of white supremacy. While Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters sought their fortunes in the North, reinventing themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past. Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood.

Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives of three Southern women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358568
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/24/2020
Pages:	704
Sales rank:	1,109,707
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is the founding director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the coauthor of the prize-winning Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Part 1 Home

Chapter 2 "Southerners of My People's Kind" 13

Chapter 3 "Lest We Forget" 31

Chapter 4 "Contrary Streams of Influence" 68

Part 2 "A New Heaven and a New Earth"

Chapter 5 "The Inner Motion Of Change" 97

Chapter 6 "Far-Thinking … Professional-Minded" Women 122

Chapter 7 "A Clear Show-Down" 148

Chapter 8 "Getting the World's Work Done" 182

Chapter 9 Writing and New York 205

Chapter 10 "Kok-I House" 229

Part 3 A Chosen Exile

Chapter 11 "The Heart of the Struggle" 255

Chapter 12 Culture and the Crisis 279

Chapter 13 Miss Lumpkin and Mrs. Douglas 299

Chapter 14 "Heartbreaking Gaps" 322

Chapter 15 Radical Dreams, Fascist Threats 342

Chapter 16 Sisters and Strangers 363

Part 4 Writing a Way Home

Chapter 17 "At the Threshold of Great Promise" 389

Chapter 18 Wilderness Years 416

Chapter 19 Expatriates Return 444

Chapter 20 Endings 477

Acknowledgments 489

Notes 493

Bibliography of Primary Sources Consulted 607

Illustration Credits 669

Index 671

Editorial Reviews

"The culmination of decades of research in special collections from the Consumers Union Archive in Yonkers, New York, to the Archives of the Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, Sisters and Rebels traces the fascinating development of female resistance to the lessons of the Confederate home."

Southern Register - Joan Wylie Hall

"An absolutely necessary, totally engaging history.… Embedded within the extraordinary lives and works of the Lumpkin sisters, we find the ‘personal yet epic narrative’ of their times—and of the South itself, especially its women. In graceful, illuminating prose, Hall speaks from her own long relationship with the sisters as well as her rigorous and comprehensive scholarship, adding yet another dimension to this fine history that reads like a novel."

Lee Smith

"Traitors to their class, loyal to their sex, race-crossers.… Hall’s evocative, gripping, and superbly well-researched story of the originality and bravery of these gentle (initially gentle) women contains both triumph and tragedy as it traces their invention of modern lives for themselves. It adds up to a sweeping, against-the-grain panorama of American history in the first half of the twentieth century."

Nancy Cott

"I loved this beautifully researched and expertly executed study of three women who were just as distinct, complicated, and problematic as the region they called home. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall again proves herself to be one of our nation’s most relevant scholars."

Wiley Cash

"Hall’s skillfully drawn biography of the Lumpkin sisters is dramatically told, and all three women are worth knowing."

Nancy Isenbergn Scholar

"A rich, revelatory story of twentieth-century America.… For all that it is a book for scholars, it is also a gripping tale to put by your bedside and read."

Journal of Social History - Kirsten Swinth

"At a time when millions hunger for hope that a better America is possible, one of our wisest historians uncovers a past we urgently need: of a left feminism organic to the South, forged through rebellion against the dehumanizing treatment of African Americans and buoyed by the Protestant social gospel and the struggles of working men and women. With page after page of surprises conveyed in crystalline prose, Sisters and Rebels recovers a world that was eclipsed by McCarthyism to show us who we can become. Centering on women who gave each other courage, Jacquelyn Hall offers unforgettable insights into how we all might manage to get free."

Nancy MacLean

"Hall is a herculean researcher.… [She] expertly gives these extraordinary sisters the recognition they deserve."

New York Times - Tony Horwitz

"Hall’s skillfully drawn biography of the Lumpkin sisters is dramatically told, and all three women are worth knowing."

American Scholar - Nancy Isenberg

…an epic, poignant biography of siblings "estranged and yet forever entangled" by the South, each other and their haunted family saga…Hall is a herculean researcher whose sources include security files she sued the Department of Justice to access. Her interviews with the elderly Lumpkins, and reflections on why and how she tracked the sisters over decades, lend an appealing journalistic and personal touch to what might otherwise be an unleavened diet of detailed scholarship…Hall expertly gives these extraordinary sisters the recognition they deserve…

The New York Times Book Review - Tony Horwitz

★ 03/25/2019

In this excellent triple biography, Hall (Like a Family) follows Elizabeth, Grace, and Katherine Lumpkin, whose lives and work touched many elements of 20th-century social history. They were born in late-19th-century Georgia, daughters of a Klansman who raised them to be persuasive orators at Confederate veterans’ reunions. Elizabeth (1888–1963) stayed true to the Lost Cause, even having a Confederate-themed wedding. Her progressive younger sisters, however, rebelled. Grace (1891–1980) and Katharine (1897–1988), influenced by liberal Christian denominations and women’s colleges, moved north and wrote in favor of equality for women and black people. Katharine earned a PhD in social work; in middle age, she wrote a landmark autobiography, The Making of a Southerner, and worked as a teacher and a journalist, often under FBI surveillance for her leftist leanings. Grace was a labor journalist and wrote fiction, but after her proletarian novel, To Make My Bread, was published in 1932, she slipped into poverty, ending up conservative, bitter, and begging back in the South. Hall alternates among the sisters’ stories, concentrating on Katharine and Grace and connecting them to broader elements of 20th-century America (including the Scottsboro Boys, mill strikes, Communism, world wars, Brown v. Board of Education, the FBI, the YWCA, and the ACLU). These admirably crafted biographies of the Lumpkins, their cohorts, and their causes opens a fascinating window on America’s social and intellectual history. Photos. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A sweeping, against-the-grain panorama of American history in the first half of the twentieth century."

Nancy F. Cott

"The word befitting this work is ‘masterpiece.’ Sisters and Rebels is an impassioned, elegant, evocative narrative that turns biography into art and scholarship into the profound understanding of a South searching for its soul."

Paula J. Giddings

"A tour de force from a remarkable historian. Jacquelyn Hall’s long-awaited chronicle of the Lumpkin sisters offers unparalleled insight into the complexities of gender and race in the lives of white southerners."

Drew Gilpin Faust

★ 2019-03-03

A history of 20th-century sisters who bore witness to Southern culture, politics, and values.

In 1973, Hall (Revolt Against Chivalry, 1993, etc.), director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, interviewed two sisters, "improbable voices from the deepest South," who each had grappled with her heritage and was shaped by a "maelstrom of historical events and processes." Grace Lumpkin (1891-1980) and her younger sister, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin (1897-1988), are the central characters in a sweeping, richly detailed intellectual and political history of America from the 1920s to the 1980s, an absorbing narrative based on impressive scholarship: the women's published and private writings; their racist father's "bitter, murderous memoir," in which he discloses participating in the Ku Klux Klan; and abundant archival sources and oral history interviews. William Lumpkin boasted that he taught his children "to love the Lost Cause"—i.e., the South's past glory and the Confederacy's "brilliant and heroic" fight. The Lumpkin sisters, however, came to see their Southern past "as both a burden and an opportunity" as they sought to create "new patterns in the tangled threads of memory and history." Both sisters observed racial violence and "grinding class inequity" that led them to redefine the meaning of whiteness and their complicity in America's social structure. Both were educated at Brenau, a women's college that drew its white students from relatively wealthy families. Grace took a degree in domestic science; Katharine became a student leader and, after graduating, worked as a traveling secretary of the YWCA, whose mission was to save souls and nurture "independent womanhood." As Grace gravitated to fiction writing, Katharine continued her education in sociology and politics, where ideas from Darwin to John Dewey shook her preconceptions. Hall traces the sisters' professional careers, their campaigns against the oppression of blacks and women, their love affairs (Katharine lived with a woman for more than three decades) and involvement in communism, and, eventually, the divergent paths that resulted in their becoming "the most intimate of strangers."

Sharply etched biographical portraits focus a compelling history.

Kirkus Reviews