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About Me

JOAN MARIE JOHNSON, PhD, is a historian and author of many articles and books on women and philanthropy, race, reform, and education. Her recent books are The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, a brief history with documents published in the Routledge Seminar Series for college classrooms, and Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870-1967, which follows the money in the woman suffrage movement, the birth control movement, the expansion of access to higher education for women, and cross-class alliances in the labor movement. Her previous books are on black and white South Carolina women’s clubs, race, southern identity, and social reform; and on Southern women educated in the North. Joan taught women’s history at Northeastern Illinois University for twelve years, was the co-founder and co-director of the Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and now works as the Director for Faculty in the Office of the Provost at Northwestern University.

Recent Publications

The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (Routledge Seminar Series, 2022). A brief history with documents.

Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy and the Women’s Movement, 1870-1967   (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875-1915   (University of Georgia Press, 2008).

Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930  (University Press of Florida, 2004).

Co-editor (with Marjorie Spruill and Valinda Littlefield), South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volumes I- III (University of Georgia Press, 2009-12).

“Following the Money: Wealthy Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement,”  Journal of Women’s History (Winter 2015).

Co-editor, “The Feminine Mystique at Fifty: Reflecting on the Book that Inspired, Angered, and Forever Changed America; a Symposium held at the Newberry Library,” Frontiers: A        Journal of Women’s Studies 36 (Fall 2015).

“Sallie Chapin, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and Reconciliation after the Civil War,” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume II (University of Georgia Press, 2010), 87-104.

“Extending College Education to Southern Women: The Southern Association of College  Women,” in The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890-1960, co-edited by Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner (Palgave MacMillan, 2007).

“Ye Gave Them a Stone”: African American Women’s Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home,  and the Black Mammy Monument,” Journal of Women’s History 17 (Spring 2005): 62- 86.

“The Shape of the Movement to Come: Women, Religion, and the Interracial Movement in 1920s South Carolina,” in “Warm Ashes”: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 201-223.

 “‘Drilling Into Us the Rebel Tradition’: The Contest Over Southern Identity in Black and White  Women’s Clubs, South Carolina, 1898-1930,” Journal of Southern History 66 (August 2000), 525-562.

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Higher Ed, Race, Women