Marjorie J. Spruill

Marjorie J. Spruill is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the University of South Carolina. Her areas of expertise include women's and gender history, American political history, and the history of the American South. Her best-known works include New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (1993) and an edited volume, One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (1995), that accompanied the pbs film "One Woman, One Vote." Her most recent book, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (2017), considers the rise of the modern women's rights movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, the mobilization of social conservatives as the "Pro-Family Movement" in reaction to the women's movement, and the conflicts between these two movements which contributed to the transformation of American political culture, leading to the highly partisan and polarized political culture in the United States from the late 1970s to the present. This work received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the Gerald Ford Foundation.