Women of the Civil Rights Movement: The Hidden Narratives and the Commemoration of a Southern Female Voice

This project examines the memory of civil rights era white female activism in the specific context of the U.S. South. In placing collective memory at the centre of a wider debate regarding the uses and misuses of historical figures within the Civil Rights Movement, this project is able to demonstrate how the notion of a “master narrative” has greatly neglected the voices of Southern white liberal women. By focusing on four southern white women, Virginia Foster Durr, Sarah Patton Boyle, Juliette Hampton Morgan and Anne Braden, this thesis will illustrate how collective memory of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have distorted the representation of female civil rights participation. Relying heavily on oral history sources, supplemented by relevant secondary literature and a wide variety of primary sources such as personal correspondence, this manuscript locates the experiences of each of these women as distinctly gendered by viewing their lives and liberal activism in relation to factors such as gender, race, and class. Furthermore, this project will employ an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on literary texts, memorials, and popular media, in order to chart the evolution of the collective memory of these unrecognised individuals from the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement to the present. By rediscovering these narratives as well as exploring the traditions and political processes of civil rights memorialisation, this project will propose how best to commemorate the hidden voices of white female civil rights activism.