The people who inspired this historical study include some who cannot be properly thanked. First, I owe a great debt to the many Durham workers who consented to be interviewed. Second, the woman who first taught me to think critically about the South never lived to see the completion of this book—or her daughter’s metamorphosis into a historian. I hope she would have approved the results of her tutelage. Later, I was fortunate to study with Gerda Lerner, a historian who led many of her students to search women’s past. Without her, this book would never have come to exist. Jack Maddex turned me into a historian of the South and forced me to change from the passive to the active voice. Anne Scott welcomed me to the South and the study of southern women. While at Duke, I also became a part of Durham through friendships and participation in the activist community. There I learned that scholars can not only analyze the world but also act on it. Although I cannot mention everyone, I must thank Lanier Rand, Bob Korstad, Peter Wood, Larry Goodwyn, Linda Guthrie, Sue Thrasher, Karen Sacks, Syd Nathans, Bill Chafe, Jackie Hall, and Esther Jenks, all of whom lived in the Durham–Chapel Hill area while I first grappled with the ideas presented here. Although my job at the Samuel Gompers Papers took me away from Durham, it also gave me the encouragement and the tangible help of Liz Fones-Wolf, Peter Albert, Stuart Kaufman, Dorotheé Schneider, and Celia Ramos Gray. On various stops along the way, I benefited from encounters with Patty Cooper, Joe Reidy, Mary Frederickson, Heidi Hartman, Julie Boddy, Alice Kessler-Harris, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Steven Hahn, Vicki Bynum, Marcia Douglass, and Bonnie Dill. Financial support came from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, the Center for Research on Women at Memphis State, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bruce Laurie, Milton Cantor, and the editorial staff of Temple University Press offered me breathing space in which to complete revisions in the midst of moving, teaching, and mothering. The staffs of the Southern Historical Collection and North Caroliniana Collection at the University of North Carolina, of Manuscripts and Archives in the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University, of the National Archives, and of Archives and Manuscripts in McKeldin Library of the University of Maryland all contributed by their patient attention to the needs of a researcher. Lastly, I must thank Maura Rigby, who taught me about motherhood as only a daughter can; Marie and Margaret, who first taught me about sisterhood; and Barry, Maura’s father, who performed all the tedious tasks for which women are usually acknowledged. This work is very much the result of all who contributed to it and much of the credit must go to them.