Childless Mothers and Lingering Daughters: How Women Shaped Ghost Stories in Twentieth Century Texas

Ghost stories are where the spiritual, intangible and psychic meet the political. Childless Mothers and Lingering Daughters investigates how the lingering trauma of enslavement has been depicted through African American ghost stories. It considers how a marketplace, tourist feminism diluted and shaped the contradictory history of the Progressive Era’s New Woman. It explores how Mexican American women’s ghost stories became a protective practice that conveyed Tejana women’s fears and gendered rebellion. And it investigates how third wave feminism on college campuses revealed an obscured history of working class women through a ghost story. Above all else, it argues that ghost stories can speak truth to patriarchal power, subvert gendered expectations, and acquiesce to the status quo. Ghost stories that center the lives of women bring into sharp relief a complicated history women, power, and Texas writ large. Texas women’s ghost stories show consistent themes such as motherhood, family, feminism, sexual control and liberation, and gendered violence. Yet race, class, and time all shape what it means to be a woman, and being a woman means different things at different times to different people. Womanhood in Texas is an incredibly contradictory and discursive state of existence that can mean everything and nothing. It can exclusive and inclusive, progressive and regressive, beautiful and painful. Through ghost stories, Childless Mothers and Lingering Daughters aims to capture the diversity of Texas womanhood and its complexities of gender, while making a case for historical significance of ghost stories.