Includes bibliographical references and index

"Three sisters from the South wrestle with orthodoxies of race, sexuality, and privilege. Born in late nineteenth-century Georgia, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. Their father was a member of the KKK; the older girls performed at rallies celebrating the 'Lost Cause.' While Elizabeth remained in the South, Grace and Katharine, moved by liberal Christianity and emboldened by the YWCA, became impassioned activists for social justice and groundbreaking progressive writers. In bohemian Greenwich Village and not-so-bluestocking Northampton, Massachusetts, they helped to forge a tradition of left-leaning, antiracist, and feminist dissent, while powerfully asserting their identity as Southern women. Distinguished historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall places these ordinary yet extraordinary women in the center of American intellectual history, and explores how each sister came to different understandings of race, gender, and the South; committed, albeit in radically different ways, to remaking the region as a place they could continue to call home"--,Provided by publisher