Drawing upon letters, autobiographies, and novels, Daughters of Time examines the strategies that various southern women writers have used to create their own "voice," their own unique expression of mind and selfhood. Lucinda H. MacKethan shows that, despite the constraining and muting effects of the South's historically patriarchal society, the region has been graced by the remarkably strong presence of women storytellers, black and white, who have asserted their determination to become themselves through creative acts of voicing.

Within a chronological structure, MacKethan examines the letters of the plantation mistress Catherine Hammond; the memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; the autobiographical writings of Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, as well as their novels Barren Ground, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Optimist's Daughter; and finally, Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies.