She first taught for more than a decade at Binghamton University and the University of Rochester, and was recruited as Founding Director for the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University. Her books include The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-century France; Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (with Eugene D. Genovese); Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism; "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women; The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (with Eugene D. Genovese); Marriage: The Dream that Refuses to Die; Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (with Eugene D. Genovese); and History and Women, Culture and Faith: Selected Writings.

She was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Cardinal Wright Award (Fellowship of Catholic Scholars), C. Hugh Holman Award (Society for the Study of Southern Literature), Julia Cherry Spruill Prize (Southern Association for Women Historians), and Outstanding Book Award (Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America).