In Telling Memories Among Southern Women, Susan Tucker presents a revealing collection of oral-history narratives that explore the complex, sometimes enigmatic bond between black female domestic workers and their white employers from the turn of the twentieth century to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Based on interviews with forty-two women of both races from the Deep South, these narratives express the full range of human emotions and successfully convey the ties that united—and the tensions and conflicts that separated—these two mutually dependent groups of women.
Susan Tucker is curator of books and records at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University in New Orleans.
“Thank you to Susan Tucker, author of the book Telling Memories Among Southern Women, whose beautiful oral accounts of domestics and their white employers took me back to a time and place that is long gone.” (in The Help)
~Kathryn Stockett
“A sensitive and passionate exploration of the way we have lived and what it has done to us. This is a splendid book.”
~Ellen Douglas, Chicago Tribune
“Susan Tucker makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of the lives and feelings of black and white southern women. The voices that emerge from her interviews ring absolutely true, by turn loving and angry, compassionate and thoughtless, but always distinctly southern.”
~Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South
“Captures the strangeness and poignancy of the separate worlds of the segregated South.”
~Columbia (S.C.) State