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Victorian women and pastimes
are topics of talk, exhibit at Wilson

By JUDITH PANITCH
University Library

CHAPEL HILL — "Mother Cotten and Crazy Daisy" will be the title of a talk on Southern women at the turn of the 20th century on Jan. 19 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Historian Dr. Anastatia Sims will give the free public lecture at 5:45 p.m. in Wilson library. Her talk will follow a 5 p.m. reception and viewing of the related exhibit "Keeping the Devil at Bay: The Pastimes of North Carolina Women in the Victorian Age, 1837-1901," up through Jan. 31 in Wilson’s North Carolina Collection Gallery.

Sims, a history professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, earned her doctorate at UNC in 1985. Her talk, in Wilson’s North Carolina Collection Reading Room, will be sponsored by Friends of the Library.

"Mother Cotten" and "Crazy Daisy" were Sallie Southall Cotten and Juliette Gordon Low, early organizers of women for civic purposes. Cotten was a president of the North Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs; Low, of Savannah, Ga., founded Girl Scouts of the USA.

"Keeping the Devil at Bay" portrays an era when idleness was considered sinful, said Linda Jacobson, assistant keeper of the North Carolina Collection Gallery. Therefore, women devised a range of activities to improve themselves and their homes. Teapots and samplers are among items displayed in the exhibit.

"The sphere of the home and activities like letter-writing and music defined women’s lives," Jacobson said.

The exhibit is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and 1-5 p.m. Sundays.

For more information about Sims’ talk, contact Liza Terll at 962-4207 or liza_terll@unc.edu. For information about the exhibit, contact Jacobson at 962-1172 or ljacobso@email.unc.edu.

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Image URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/event/Victorians.jpg

Caption: A facsimile of this cabinet card, produced in Raleigh in the 1880s, is part of the exhibition "Keeping the Devil at Bay: The Pastimes of North Carolina Women in the Victorian Age, 1837-1901" at UNC-Chapel Hill’s North Carolina Collection Gallery in Wilson Library through Jan. 31. A cabinet card was a type of photo portrait common in those days.

University Library contact: Judith Panitch, (919) 962-1301, panitch@email.unc.edu

News Services contacts: Print, L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589; broadcast, Karen Moon, (919) 962-8595