Southern Women

Caroline M. Dillman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780891168386
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136557033
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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Chapter 1

THE SPARSITY OF RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS ON SOUTHERN WOMEN: DEFINITIONAL COMPLEXITIES, METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, AND OTHER IMPEDIMENTS¹

CAROLINE MATHENY DILLMAN

A glance through the sociohistorical literature on the South and Southerners, both old and new, reveals the usual near absence of women, as is true for most publications in all disciplines. Any mention of women in scholarly works is almost always as an appendage to men. Rarely is there anything of substance about women—about their lives, their activities, and their contributions to society. “Historically speaking,” Anne Scott writes, “southern women in the century since 1880 scarcely exist.”²

Authors responsible for the proliferation of sociological works on the South from the middle to the end of the first half of this century were almost exclusively male.³ The notable exceptions during that period were Katherine Jocher and Harriet L. Herring, whose works did not focus on women,⁴ and Julia Cherry Spruill and Guion Griffis Johnson,⁵ whose works will be discussed later. It is interesting to compare the Twelve Southerners who wrote the famous I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 with the Fifteen Southerners who wrote the 1981 update, Why the South Will Survive—all the authors in both the first and the second book are male.⁶ Fifty years has not produced much change in gender authorship.

THE LITERATURE ON SOUTHERN WOMEN

It was not until the early 1970s, with the advent of the women’s movement, that a book written by a Southern woman about Southern women was recognized as being of scholarly significance and worthy of something more than a brief flicker of local acclaim: Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930.

In Scott’s bibliographic essay, she says that “[m]anuscript sources for a study of southern women are vast and have hardly been touched for this purpose.” She also tells us that “[p]rinted sources are vast” from which data can be mined. But then she notes the scarcity of “scholarly publications and unpublished papers bearing on the subject” saying that they “are so few that I can list a high proportion of the total.” Earlier in this essay she refers to the scholarly articles and books as “a handful.”⁷

That was in 1970. Thirteen years later and much more recently (in 1983) the editors of another publication on Southern women wrote a similar lament in their introduction, “Historians … have shown a curious lack of interest in southern women.”⁸

Before Scott’s book, which has come to be regarded as a publishing event, there were two important works but they had been “lost.” The works were Julia Cherry Spruill’s Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies and Guion Johnson’s Ante-Bellum North Carolina. Scott says, in her discussion of these two books, “One would expect that two such excellent books would have inspired a stream of follow-up studies; but alas, neither of these women was able to secure a regular academic appointment. Neither had graduate students.”⁹ So in the 1970s, we had access to three major scholarly works (howbeit one gathering dust in library stacks), all covering a lengthy span of time; but they were mainly about educated, or at least literate, women. Hagood’s Mothers of the South, a rich book but narrow in time frame (the 1930s), does address rural, very poor women and also has recently been “rediscovered” and reprinted.¹⁰

Two other books reprinted after lying dormant for several decades since their original publication, one in 1926, the other in 1946, give a picture of the lives of Southern women born around the turn of the century. Frances Newman’s thinly disguised autobiography, The Hard-Boiled Virgin, is described on its cover as “The 1926 novel of an Atlanta woman imprisoned by tradition.”¹¹ Newman herself said she thought it was “the first novel in which a woman ever told the truth about how women feel.”¹² Although the protagonist and the author are unique in defying Southern traditions, the book vividly conveys the expected lifestyle of Southern women in that era. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin’s book, The Making of a Southerner, is described on its cover as “The autobiography of a Southern woman ahead of her time.”¹³ Both Newman and Lumpkin focus mainly on the lives of educated Southern women from either wealthy families or on those of impoverished gentility.

Lillian Smith, whose Killers of the Dream was published originally in 1949, again in 1961, and more recently in 1978, is another example of a female writing about growing up in the South during the first decades of this century.¹⁴ Smith made her mark as a Southern woman daring to expose the racial and sexual overtones of the socialization process of Southerners. Lumpkin, less well known, addresses the same issues through relating the metamorphosis in her views concerning racism. Each of these writers were “without honor in [her] own country,” and for most of her life Smith suffered ostracism by the people in her native South.¹⁵

A more recent scholarly study on Southern-lady women (a term I use to designate Southern women from educated and/or moneyed families) during the 1920s and early 1930s is Jacquelyn D. Hall’s Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching.¹⁶ Once again, we have the history of a group of educated, higher status women, this time focusing on a social issue. Scott, referring to her sources, says the women “who left a mark on the historical record” were “for the most part women of educated or wealthy families”¹⁷; and all but one of the works reviewed thus far portray mainly educated women from high-status families. All are portrayals of women who reached adulthood prior to the 1930s.

Other works are coming into prominence. Some of these are rediscovered works now being reprinted; others have been written in the last decade. Many address women’s lives during the Civil War period, once again those of higher-status women, and one was written by a man.¹⁸ But the three main books mentioned here initially (Scott’s, Spruill’s, and Johnson’s) remain the early classics and with two other major works published in the early 1980s form the main sociohistorical books on Southern women that cover the periods up to the 1940s. One goes beyond this date into contemporary times. The new publications are Catherine Clinton’s The Plantation Mistress and Shirley Abbott’s Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South.¹⁹

Clinton’s work fills in the chronological gap between the two books on colonial Southern women and Scott’s work on Southern women from 1830 to 1930. In addition, Clinton has been hailed as “the first scholar systematically to apply the new perspective of women’s history to the Old South.”²⁰ Abbott gives us for the first time a scholarly work on rural Southern women over a lengthy period of time and one that includes the current generation.

Two other works are extremely important additions to the scant work on contemporary Southern women. Stepping Off the Pedestal: Academic Women in the South, edited by Patricia A. Stringer and Irene Thompson, contains articles by and about contemporary Southern as well as non-Southern women—all women in the South who have had or are having to deal with the impact of Southern culture on their lives in the academic world there.²¹ Sex, Race, and the Role of Women in the South, edited by Joanne V. Hawks and Sheila L. Skemp, includes articles on Southern working women from 1880 to 1950; on the public roles of Southern women; on black women in Washington, D.C., from 1890 to 1920; on the portrayal of Southern women’s lives by Southern literary women; and on Southern women’s history.

These two publications, curiously, are just about the only ones that include at least some material on contemporary high-status Southern women (Stringer and Thompson) and on lower-status Southern women prior to the middle of this century (Hawks and Skemp). With the exception of Abbott’s and Hagood’s books, almost all the publications about Southern women’s lives before the 1940s focus on Southern-lady women. The situation is reversed after that period. Many recent studies and publications ignore Southern-lady women of the last few decades and those in contemporary times and in their stead focus on Southern black women (e.g., Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, and Molly C. Dougherty, Becoming a Woman in Rural [Southern] Black Culture)²²; on Appalachian women (e.g., Kathy Kahn, Hillbilly Women)²³; on industrial women (e.g., the oral history project conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and directed by Jacquelyn Hall).²⁴

Southern Exposure’s special issue entitled “Growing Up Southern,” popular enough to have been reprinted in book form, and another special issue entitled “Generations: Women in the South” contain only fragments on the Southern lady, the higher-status white Southern woman, and the more middle-class Southern woman.²⁵ Such studies and publications on contemporary women in the South include nothing about Southern-lady women and ignore those who form a gray area between them and lower-status Southern women.

A review of works on Southern women would be incomplete without mentioning Rosemary Daniell’s Fatal Flowers and Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen.²⁶ Daniell’s work, although continuing to be controversial as to its literary merits and its contribution to the body of literature on Southern women, was a real breakthrough in the area of Southern women writing about Southern women—without mincing words, without covering up for the sake of propriety or in defense of Southern culture, without Pollyanna sentimentality, without the author’s head in the sand. Though Daniell is misunderstood by many non-Southern readers as representing in her book most if not all kinds of Southern women and though many generalize the women she portrays to include several categories she omits, her work is an important contribution.

Daniell’s work was published after King’s book, but Southern Ladies and Gentlemen was and still is taken mainly as a tongue-in-cheek Southern joke, except by a few female scholars who are studying Southern women. (Just a look at the quotes on the cover will give the perceived tone and mood of the book, e.g., “The best seller that catches Dixie right between the sheets.”) Stringer and Thompson’s work begins with epigraphs that include excerpts from King’s book—they take her work very seriously. Though threads of the culture form the warp and woof of King’s book, as well as Daniell’s, the real message is missed or dismissed as exaggerated stereotypes. Its popularity was and is based mainly on the humorous manner in which Southerners are depicted, a sort of witty interpretation of the same old media images.²⁷

The following sections address the problems that have inhibited, or distorted, research and publications on Southern women and that have contributed significantly to the scarcity of both.

THE CULTURAL TABOO FOR WOMEN WRITERS: THE GLARING OMISSION IN MALE-AUTHORED WORKS

Impediments to the study of Southerners in general and Southern women in particular can be attributed to a number of inherent methodological problems that include lack of accessibility to the population; the tendency of non-Southern researchers to equate Southerners with people living in university or college isolation or in large melting-pot areas like metro-Atlanta; S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The Sparsity of Research and Publications on Southern Women: Definitional Complexities, Methodological Problems, and Other Impediments
• 2 A Myth of the Southern Lady: Antebellum Proslavery Rhetoric and the Proper Place of Woman
• 3 “My OI’ Black Mammy” in American Historiography
• 4 Toward an Understanding of the Quadroon Society of New Orleans, 1780–1860
• 5 Lorraine Hansberry as Visionary: Black and White Antebellum Southern Women in Concert
• 6 Growing Up Female, White, and Southern in the 1850s and 1860s
• 7 The Civil War and Black Women on the Sea Islands
• 8 Heirs of the Southern Progressive Tradition: Women in Southern Legislatures in the 1920s
• 9 The Black Domestic in the South: Her Legacy as Mother and Mother Surrogate
• 10 Socialization for Change: The Cultural Heritage of the White Southern Woman
• 11 The Code of the New Southern Belle: Generating Typifications to Structure Social Interaction
• 12 Ladies: South by Northwest
• 13 Magnolias and Microchips: Regional Subcultural Constructions of Femininity
• 14 And the Girls Became Women: Aspirations and Expectations versus Attainments of Low-Income Black and White Southern Females
• 15 Southern Women and Textile Work: Job Satisfaction
• 16 Stronger than Love: Louisiana’s Sugar Cane Women
• 17 Women and Violence: The Intersection of Two Components of Southern Ideology
• 18 Southern White Women Business Owners: Variations on Scripts
• 19 Southern Women Writing about Southern Women: Jill McCorkle, Lisa Alther, Gail Godwin, Ellen Gilchrist, and Lee Smith
• Index