Life Studies Women, race, class, and engendering the South.
Nobody writes books about women in the Midwest.
If you can imagine an enduring line of Scarletts, Mammies, and Daisy Maes a few hundred miles due north, you might just see a book on women in the Midwest. But take those fictional standbys, substitute the words class, race, and history and what you have is the threefold perspective in Neither Separate Nor Equal , plus a baker's dozen of wide-ranging topics by a wide range of authors. But about those topics. Those words race, class, gender, and sexuality run like a mantra throughout Neither Separate Nor Equal , and it's fitting they do because Barbara Ellen Smith has made them her focus since earning a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University in 1981. Since heading the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis in 1995, that focus has if anything broadened and more concentrated her attention on the status of women in Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, and the entire Mid-South.