SAWH Annual Address & Reception


For more than four decades, the SAWH has sponsored an annual keynote address and reception at the fall meeting of the Southern Historical Association. The SAWH president customarily chooses a scholar to give the address. As part of our ongoing efforts to support the work of women historians, we encourage you to make a donation to support the SAWH Annual Address and Reception.  Your generous contributions help fund our events and ensure that the SAWH remains a visible and important presence at each annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association.

A list of past speakers follows, along with paper titles and meeting locations.

2023: Melissa Walker, “’The heyday of a woman’s life is the shady side of fifty’–or Is It? Twentieth-Century Women and the Experience of Aging,” November 11, 2023, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Charlotte, North Carolina. SAWH+women+and+aging+final+draft.pdf (squarespace.com)

2022: Amy Murrell Taylor, “Reckoning With Allyship: Emily Howland’s Attempt to Reconstruct Virginia After Emancipation,” November 12, 2022, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland.

2021: Judith Giesberg,”I desire some information about my mother”: Henry Tibbs’ Search for His Mother and What It Can Tell Us about How Slavery Shaped American Family Values,” November 5, 2021, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, virtual.

2020: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Writing a Way Home: A Life in Southern and Women’s History,” November 20, 2020, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting via Zoom and available here.

2019: Anne Sarah Rubin, “‘I can’t buy one mouth full of nothing to eat’:  Women and the Struggle for Sustenance in the Civil War South,” November 9, 2019, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Louisville, Kentucky.

2018: Kendra Field, “‘Things to Be Forgotten’: African American Family Histories and Silences After Emancipation,” November 11, 2018, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Birmingham, Alabama.

2017: Cynthia A. Kierner, “Awful Calamity: Sentiment, Gender, and the Nation in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811,” November 11, 2017, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas.

2016: Cherisse Jones Branch, “’Been a Guinea Pig in this Race’: Annie R. Zachary, Arkansas Homemaker, Farmer, and Politician,” Southern Historical Association Annual meeting, November 11, 2016, St. Petersburg, Florida.

2015 Anya Jabour, “The Making of a Southern Feminist: Sophinisba Preston Breckinridge,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, November 14, 2015, Little Rock, Arkansas.

2014 Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Partus Sequitur Ventrum’: Colonial Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, November 14, 2014, Atlanta, Georgia.

2013 LaShonda Mims, “Drastic Dykes: The New South and Lesbian Life from Hotlanta to the Queen City,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, November 6, 2013, St. Louis, Missouri.

2012 Crystal Feimster, “‘Indecent and Obscene’: White Officers, Black Women, and Rape in the ‘Contraband Quarters’ of the American Civil War,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, November 3, 2012, Mobile, Alabama.

2011 Elizabeth Hayes Turner, “‘To Help Our Nation Find Its Soul’: Women and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, October 29, 2011, Baltimore, Maryland.

2010 Heather Ann Thompson, “Redemption Redux? Southern Politics, Economy, and Society in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, November 6, 2010, Charlotte, North Carolina.

2009 Rebecca Sharpless, “Remembering Past One Another: Idella Parker, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Autobiography at Cross Creek,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, November 7, 2009, Louisville, Kentucky.

2008 Sandra Treadway, “Pioneers to Power Brokers: Women Office Holders in Twentieth-Century Virginia,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, October 11, 2008, New Orleans, Louisiana.

2007 Michele Gillespie, “Making Herself Modern: Katharine Smith Reynolds and the New South,” Richmond, Virginia.

2006 Anne Firor Scott, “Reading Other People’s Mail,” Birmingham, Alabama.

2005 Jacqueline Jones, “Nancy Johnson’s Story: Rethinking the History of Women in the South During the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Atlanta, Georgia.

2004 Grace Elizabeth Hale, “The Southern Black Roots of Postwar American Culture and Politics, or the Strange Career of the White Negro,” Memphis, Tennessee.

2003 Marjorie Julian Spruill, “Countdown to Houston: The 1977 IWY Conferences and the Polarization of American Women,” Houston, Texas.

2002 Jane Dailey, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred from Brown to Selma,” Baltimore, Maryland.

2001 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “The ABWH, Black Women’s History, and Black Women Historians,” New Orleans, Louisiana.

2000 Nancy A. Hewitt, “Seneca Falls, Suffrage, and the South: Remapping the Landscape of Women’s Rights in America, 1848-1965,” Louisville, Kentucky.

1999 Stephanie McCurry, “‘The Brothers’ War’?: Free Women, Slaves, and Popular Politics in the Civil War ‘South,'” Fort Worth, Texas.

1998 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Writing A Way Home: History, Memory, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity,” Birmingham, Alabama.

1997 Darlene Clark Hine, “A Stronger Soul Within a Finer Frame: Writing a Literary History of Black Women,” Atlanta, Georgia.

1996 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “‘But She Can’t Find Her (V.O.) Key’: Writing Gender and Race Into Southern Political History,” Little Rock, Arkansas.

1995 Anne Firor Scott, “Unfinished Business . . .,” New Orleans, Louisiana.

1994 Jean B. Lee, “Experiencing the American Revolution,” Louisville, Kentucky.

1993 Thavolia Glymph, “Civil War Memoirs and the Reinvention of Black Women’s History,” Orlando, Florida.

1992 Theda Perdue, “Pochahontas Meets Columbus in the American South,” Atlanta, Georgia.

1991 Virginia van der Veer Hamilton, “Clio’s Daughters: Whence and Whither?” Fort Worth, Texas.

1990 Catherine Clinton, “Sex and the Sectional Conflict,” New Orleans, Louisiana.

1989 Barbara Welter, “The True Woman: Post-Feminist or Retro-Feminist?” Lexington, Kentucky.

1988 Suzanne Lebsock, “White Supremacy and Woman Suffrage: A Virginia Case Study,” Norfolk, Virginia.

1987 Joan Cashin, “Women’s Work and Culture in the Old Southwest,” New Orleans, Louisiana.

1986 Mary Frederickson, “Sassing Fate: Women Workers in the Twentieth-Century South,” Charlotte, North Carolina.

1985 Barbara Fields, Houston, Texas.

1984 Tom Appleton and Nancy Baird, “Vignettes of Kentucky Women,” Louisville, Kentucky.

1983 Thavolia Glymph, “Black Women Historians: Race, Class, and Academia,” Charleston, South Carolina.

1982 A. Elizabeth Taylor, LaWanda Cox, and Mollie Davis presented a Report on the Status of Women in the Profession. The January 1983 SAWH newsletter says that Anne Firor Scott also spoke about the life and work of Julia Cherry Spruill and Carol Bleser spoke on the life and work of Willie Lee Rose. The meeting was held in Memphis, Tennessee.

1981 Anne Firor Scott, Louisville, Kentucky.

1980 LaWanda Cox, Blanche Clark, and Frederick Heath presented papers on the three women presidents of SHA. The meeting was held in Atlanta, Georgia.

1979 A. Elizabeth Taylor, Atlanta, Georgia.