Professor Spruill teaches survey classes in U.S. History (post-1876) and women’s history; specialty courses in women’s history and southern history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; recent American history (post-1945); and “The Historian’s Craft,” the methods course for History majors. 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); and Hagar, a reprint edition of Mary Johnston’s 1913 suffrage novel (University Press of Virginia). 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).

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 US 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.