This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a women’s group that formed following Hurricane Katrina. Using fifty in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of participants, field observations, and documentary sources, I investigate emergent organizational responses to disaster; the intersections of race, class, gender, and culture in social movements; and social inequality and social change. The analysis of empirical data focuses on the tensions between identity and difference and examines how the group organized around the category “women” while seeking to diversify its membership to reflect social differences. The subsequent discussion focuses on the group’s strategic deployment of gender, culture, and geography in recovery efforts. Drawing on the micro-sociology of manners and etiquette as well as cultural geography and theories of cultural trauma, I examine how participants accounted for their experiences through notions of Southern manners and femininity, constructed relational definitions of place, and engaged in gendered performances of cultural memory. I argue that individual members and the group as a whole used Hurricane Katrina to renegotiate a sense of identity and difference, while using cultural and spatial resources to confront injustice, inequality, and social suffering. My thesis contributes to empirical studies of gender, culture, and social movements by examining the emergence of a women-organized group following an extreme event.