In Search of Agrarian Women in the Material Culture of the Post-bellum Sandhills

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Although World War I proved a boon for the suffrage movement, it resulted in the displacement of the agrarian communities of South Carolina’s Sandhills. Beginning in 1917, war preparations centered on the construction of Fort Jackson just outside of Columbia. As the Fort expanded, agrarian families across the Sandhills resisted development. This paper delves into the world of the agrarian women, who labored, lived, and weathered the militarization of their homes. Cultural material, histories, and census data from 40 nineteenth and early 20th century archaeological sites are assessed here. Through comparison of these sites, this paper explores the variability and scale of female agency in the landscape and artifacts of post-bellum farmsteads. In this way, this paper attempts to begin to elucidate the identity of the far less well-known women who stood in the way of war time readiness, as suffragettes leveraged that very mechanism to obtain the vote.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2020 SHA General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 621