Women's history

During Reconstruction, one of the most turbulent periods for race relations in the state’s history, Sarah Ann Dickey, a White female teacher from the North, became a pioneer by providing education to newly freed enslaved people in Mississippi. Dickey worked tirelessly and determinedly to improve the lives of the most vulnerable population group in the state, African American women and children. She believed that by educating Black women and training them to become teachers, dual paths of security and opportunity could be established for all freedmen.

Mississippi University for Women, originally the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls, was the first taxpayer supported college for women in the United States.

Mississippi had pockets of strong local civil rights activity before the Freedom Riders entered the state, but their presence in 1961 propelled the local movement to new heights.

Without question, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey was one of the most intellectually gifted women of Mississippi.  With considerable aplomb, she dealt as best she could with the emotional tensions arising from her lifelong compulsion to balance the conventional female role of the plantation South with a more rigorous life of the mind.  Her heart and soul refused to submit to all the repressive demands that held women in a virtual prison, called hearth and home.  But finding a proper balance between these polarities in the 19th century was scarcely easy.  

Fannye A. Cook, the force behind the creation of the Mississippi agency known as the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, and its educational and research arm, the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, was the first person to collect and catalog Mississippi wildlife, and to lead the effort to protect and restore the state’s natural environment.

Lucy Somerville Howorth once described herself as a lawyer, politician, and feminist. She believed that girls and women should have the same access to college, a career, and professional promotions as society offered to boys and men. It really was not a radical idea in her day, but many women were afraid to be called a “feminist.” Not Lucy, who once said, “I glory in being a feminist.”

Any reference to art in Mississippi and the South since the early part of the 20th century would not be complete without Marie Hull. Her art and life as a painter and teacher have influenced hundreds of young artists to make their way in art.

From the 1975 Marie Hull Exhibit brochure

Marie Atkinson made the discovery at the age of twenty, that she “wanted to paint more than anything else.”