Angie Maxwell holds the Diane Blair Endowed Chair in Southern Studies and is a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, where she also serves as director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society. Maxwell is a Truman Scholar who received her PhD in American studies from the University of Texas. Her research and commentary have been featured on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN, as well as in the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, and in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’sReconstruction: America after the Civil War on PBS. Maxwell is coauthor of The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), which was named a Times Higher Education Book of the Week, and author of The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which won the V. O. Key Award for best book on Southern politics. She is also the editor of several books, including The Legacy of Second-Wave Feminism in American Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
The seismic polarization of white women in America is not only a function of partisanship, region, religiosity, education, or racism, but also results from a divergent notion of “womanhood” — or what it means to be a “good woman.” The politicization of this divergent notion of “womanhood” muddies our understanding of contemporary polling, of the “Gender Gap,” and of abortion attitudes — and it can swing elections. Maxwell’s project, “The Polarization of White Women in American Politics,” will measure this notion of “womanhood” in real time, and trace it to its roots.
May 2024
