'A new representative of southern intellect': Julia Anna Flisch, a new woman of the New South

Julia Anna Flisch (1861--1941), educator, author, and advocate for educational and occupational opportunities for women, represents the many southern women who when faced with the struggles and challenges of a time of social, political, and economic unrest lived their lives in ways both big and small which opened doors for future women. This study of her life and works provides insights into late nineteenth-century perceptions of appropriate "women's work" and reveals gender as a defining element in technical opportunities and programs. Reconstructing the puzzle of one woman's life offers a valuable prism through which to view the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century evolution of southern women. Flisch represents a forgotten element of the New South: women who did not have the family connections and/or wealth to make them a part of the elite, but whose education and profession excluded them from the traditional working class. The lives of such women epitomize the complexities and contradictions so characteristic of both life in the New South and the history of women in general. Flisch's fight for female opportunities delineates critical changes in the concept and purpose of education for southern females which paradoxically served to broaden yet nevertheless constrain southern women within the parameters of a changing but persistently patriarchal social structure. Flisch's fight for new and expanded opportunities for women illuminates where we have been, and perhaps where we should be going.