Specializes in United States history, particularly women’s and gender history and the history of the American South.

Professor Spruill teaches courses U. S. women’s history, southern history, recent American history, and historical methodology. She is the author of New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (Oxford University Press) and the editor of One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (NewSage Press); VOTES FOR WOMEN! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (University of Tennessee Press). She is co-editor of The South in the History of the Nation: A Reader (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (University of Georgia Press). She is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Southern Historical Association, and is former president of the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Current Activities

My most recent research continues my interest in the intersection of ideas about gender and politics. I am exploring the emergence of cultural conflict between feminists and antifeminists in the 1970s, the politicization of social conservatives, and the role of gender in the right turn in American politics in the late 1970s. My current book project focuses on the 1977 state and national International Women’s Year (IWY) conferences which were supposed to inform the U. S. Congress on best policies for American women but polarized American women--even as they galvanized feminists and antifeminists for a prolonged struggle over women’s and family issues that continues today. I am also at work on an anthology on South Carolina women, with co-editors Valinda Littlefield and Joan Johnson.