The Tobacco Wives

Myers weaves the tension between societal constraints and female empowerment throughout the novel. Each female character experiences moments of gender-based limitation at the hands of individual men in power or more general patriarchal structures, but each woman ultimately finds a way to subvert male control and find empowerment through work and agency.

Myers portrays each of her female characters in a wide variety of circumstances to illustrate the fullness of the female experience despite societal constraints. Women do not simply embody a single characteristic, role, or function in the novel and Myers presents several examples of this. As a pioneer at Bright Leaf Tobacco as the sole female auctioneer, Ashely values her career and autonomy but is also a wife and mother. She imparts advice to Maddie about the importance of individual accomplishment and exemplifies emerging options for women in business when she founds an organization solely for women. Cornelia, a resilient woman who is well-read on women’s activism and feminist theory, is still at the mercy of her own sons to give her a position on the board or directors. Though she was not able to claim credit for her ideas that led to the town’s prosperity, Cornelia positions Maddie to ascend to positions of leadership by introducing her to Virginia Woolf and the concept of knowledge as power.