Scarlett's Sisters
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Scarlett's Sisters

Young Women in the Old South

Anya Jabour

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Scarlett's Sisters

Young Women in the Old South

Anya Jabour

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About This Book

Scarlett's Sisters explores the meaning of nineteenth-century southern womanhood from the vantage point of the celebrated fictional character's flesh-and-blood counterparts: young, elite, white women. Anya Jabour demonstrates that southern girls and young women faced a major turning point when the Civil War forced them to assume new roles and responsibilities as independent women. Examining the lives of more than 300 girls and women between ages fifteen and twenty-five, Jabour traces the socialization of southern white ladies from early adolescence through young adulthood. Amidst the upheaval of the Civil War, Jabour shows, elite young women, once reluctant to challenge white supremacy and male dominance, became more rebellious. They adopted the ideology of Confederate independence in shaping a new model of southern womanhood that eschewed dependence on slave labor and male guidance. By tracing the lives of young white women in a society in flux, Jabour reveals how the South's old social order was maintained and a new one created as southern girls and young women learned, questioned, and ultimately changed what it meant to be a southern lady. Scarlett's Sisters explores the meaning of nineteenth-century southern womanhood from the vantage point of the celebrated fictional character's flesh-and-blood counterparts: young, elite, white women. Anya Jabour demonstrates that southern girls and young women faced a major turning point when the Civil War forced them to assume new roles and responsibilities as independent women. Examining the lives of more than 300 girls and women between ages fifteen and twenty-five, Jabour traces the socialization of southern white ladies from early adolescence through young adulthood. By tracing the lives of these young women in a society in flux, Jabour reveals how the South's old social order was maintained and a new one created as southern girls and young women learned, questioned, and ultimately changed what it meant to be a southern lady.
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Information

Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Year
2009
ISBN
9780807887646
Topic
Social Sciences
Subtopic
Gender Studies
Index
Social Sciences

1
Young Ladies

Adolescence
Images

“THE LADY YOU WOULD HAVE ME BE”: LIZZIE KIMBERLY

When Lizzie Kimberly, the daughter of University of North Carolina professor John Kimberly, left her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to attend St. Mary’s School in Raleigh in 1856, she was thirteen years old and rapidly approaching adulthood. As her aunt remarked, “Lizzie grows so fast she will be a Young Lady in size before she is one in mind unless she applys [sic] herself closely to her studies.” While Lizzie did indeed apply herself to her studies, she devoted even more attention to another task: becoming a young lady. Over the next three years, Lizzie became increasingly aware of what it meant to become a southern lady and increasingly anxious to adhere to the standards of ladylike conduct. Her correspondence with her father from 1856 to 1859 illuminates the teen years as a period of transition from childhood to adulthood—and the transformation of a girl into a lady.1
At age fourteen, Lizzie still considered herself a “little girl” and enjoyed boisterous outdoor play. In November 1857, she reported to her father that she and the other “little girls” liked to “run out in the woods and play and ride on the branches of the tall pine trees.” Lizzie was unconcerned with propriety; pleasure was her aim. “We have fun,” she pronounced emphatically.2
Soon, however, the girls’ “fun” began to foreshadow their future. Later that same winter, in February 1858, Lizzie and her schoolmates built “a snow lady” in the center of the schoolyard. “It has a very large hoop and a very small waist,” she explained, and was “made to imitate some of the fashionable young ladies” at school, complete with “laced bodies and large hoops.”3 Although Lizzie and her playmates may have been poking fun at the airs that the “fashionable young ladies” put on, they were no doubt also aware that they too would soon don corsets and hoopskirts.
While Lizzie was surely not wearing either a corset or a hoopskirt when she engaged in such vigorous activities, by the following summer, she needed a new wardrobe; “all my dresses was [sic] too small,” she explained to her father, despite her attempts to let out tucks and hems to prolong their life, and she had outgrown her underclothes as well. In her fifteenth year, Lizzie lengthened her skirts, exchanged the loose-fitting chemise of girlhood for the form-fitting corset of womanhood, and joined the ranks of “the fashionable young ladies” at her school.4
The restrictive clothing in vogue in the mid-nineteenth-century South both represented and required a new concern with proper behavior rather than with boisterous play. Lizzie soon adopted a more dignified manner that befitted her standing (and her clothing) as “a grown lady.” After her fifteenth birthday in March 1858, much to her younger sister Emma’s evident disgust, Lizzie preferred “to sit up like a young lady and talk, and laugh,” rather than play outdoors.5
Lizzie’s transformation from little girl to young lady was not only external. As she approached her fifteenth birthday, she wrote to her father to ask permission to join the Episcopal Church. “I am old enough,” she argued, “and I wish to lead a christain [sic] life.” When John Kimberly responded favorably, Lizzie was delighted. Confirmation would transform her not only from an unbeliever to a Christian but also from a child to an adult—and, equally importantly, from a girl to a woman: “I am so glad that you like for me to be a true christain [sic] woman,” she wrote to her father.6
Being “a true christain woman” meant, among other things, repressing anger. With her natural high spirits, Lizzie evidently found it difficult to adhere to codes of conduct that viewed anger as both sinful and unladylike. In April 1858, Emma tattled that Lizzie had “been angry several times since confirmation.” Such displays of temper threatened to negate both Lizzie’s claim to Christianity and her standing as a well-behaved young lady. Although she found the task difficult, Lizzie did her best to subdue her passions and govern her temper. “It is so hard Father to be meek submitting and unmindful of self,” she confessed in November 1858.7
Learning to be “meek submitting and unmindful of self,” like wearing cumbersome clothing and making polite conversation, was part and parcel of becoming a lady, however, and Lizzie was determined to lead “a young lady’s life.” In spring 1858, she began calling herself “Lilly,” a nickname that called attention to her new, adult identity. People outside of the family also recognized Lizzie’s new status; during a summer trip to a fashionable retreat in the North Carolina countryside in July 1858, Lizzie was delighted to be addressed as “Miss Kimberly,” a title that signified her standing as a young lady rather than a little girl.8
Although she continued to struggle with her temper, by 1859, Lizzie could with some justification claim to be a young lady in both body and mind. On the day that made her “sweet sixteen,” she boasted to her father that she was no longer “awkward” but had heard “a good many persons say how lady like and graceful [she] was.” Lizzie did her best to be ladylike in attitude, as well as appearance: “I hope I may . . . learn to conquer all my passions,” she vowed, and become “the lady you would have me be.”9
Three years of intense self-scrutiny and intentional self-fashioning had transformed Lizzie Kimberly from a hoydenish tomboy into a sedate young lady. Like young Lizzie, many southern girls expressed a desire to adopt ladylike behavior when they entered their teens. Also like Lizzie, other southern girls found that becoming a lady was a complicated and lengthy process. Becoming a lady meant giving up childish play for adult pursuits—and adopting new clothing that both symbolized and enforced the decorum expected of young ladies. It also meant adopting a gentle, agreeable manner—and, hopefully, the morality that reinforced and made genuine the display of amiability required of southern ladies. Ultimately, however, becoming a lady meant learning to please others; whether inspired by Christian principles or social pressures, girls like Lizzie Kimberly learned to tailor their behavior to others’ desires and to become the ladies that others would have them be. The teen years thus suggest what was at stake for southern girls-becoming-women: what privileges they stood to gain, and what liberties they stood to lose.10

“I DID AS I PLEASED”: GIRLHOOD

Before they entered their teens, southern girls experienced significant license in their daily activities. The reminiscences of Virginian Nell Grey illuminate the relative freedom of the preteen years. Commenting on antebellum life from the vantage point of the early twentieth century, Grey contrasted the “reserve of the American girl” in her teens with “the freedom with which Southern children entered into the social life.”11
Grey’s use of the term “children,” rather than “girls,” was significant, for in the antebellum South, girls’ and boys’ lives were not sharply demarcated prior to adolescence. Southern women’s reminiscences are full of fond recollections of friends of both sexes. Although some girls were educated privately at home or attended all-girl schools, boys and girls often attended school together. Boys and girls also played together. Without regard to gender (or race, according to some accounts), southern children engaged in many vigorous outdoor activities: snowball fights, sliding on the ice, and sledding in the winter; “running games,” fishing, swimming, and wading in brooks, and sliding down grassy hillsides on planks in the summer.12
Girls’ play with each other was similarly active. Gay Robertson Black-ford, who grew up at The Meadows, a plantation in Washington County, Virginia, before the Civil War, described a particularly rowdy game of blind-man’s bluff (a popular game in which a blindfolded child fumbles about in search of the other players, who dance just beyond reach) in her postwar reminiscences. While she and her sister Lizzie were playing in the “nursery” upstairs, their running and jumping caused the plaster of the ceiling of the room below to crack.13
Outdoor activities were still more lively. Anna Rosalie Quitman, the daughter of a wealthy sugar planter in the Natchez, Mississippi, area, attended a neighborhood school where she joined a group of high-spirited girls who enjoyed vigorous outdoor play during midday recess. Quitman’s journal, which she began keeping when she was ten years old, suggested that she and her playmates enjoyed freedom to roam around the schoolyard and surrounding woods, where they found numerous ways of entertaining themselves and each other. On one occasion, when one enterprising girl brought a dead crow to school, the entire gang took turns kicking the feathered carcass down to the bay. Other pastimes were more organized, though no less active. An especially popular game was one that Quitman simply called “Bear.” Although the details of this game are unclear, “Bear” was evidently an active game, as on one occasion, Quitman tripped over a stump and hurt herself while playing.14
Georgia resident Ella Anderson Clark also enjoyed outdoor play. In her postwar memoirs, she described the “great fun” that she and her female classmates had damming up a stream near her neighborhood school. The girls hurried to remove their high shoes and woolen stockings, roll up their pantalets, and hold up their petticoats to wade in the resulting “pond” before the dam broke. When it did, joyous panic ensued: “‘There goes the dam’ someone screamed and amid peals of laughter each one hopelessly tried to stop the break,” recalled Clark, adding, “Oh the carefreeness of that country life! I can hear the screams and merry laughter after all these years!”15 Such wistful recollections indicate that as children, white girls in the antebellum South enjoyed the opportunity to engage in raucous romps with each other, with boys, and, sometimes, with slave playmates.
Girls combined such spirited play with more sedate pursuits, such as reading novels and “fairy tales,” holding tea parties, picking flowers, drawing or painting, and playing with dolls. Such activities set elite girls apart not only from boys, who avoided such feminine play, but also from slaves, who lacked the education and the tools to engage in these types of leisure activities. Unlike outdoor play, indoor play segregated children by both gender and race. Much as they enjoyed running and yelling outside, girls also appreciated the quieter indoor activities that indicated the racial privilege and gender role they would assume as adults. Georgian Loula Kendall Rogers pronounced that she “had always rather read than do any thing else” and recalled with pleasure the “plays” that she and her girlfriends wrote, directed, and acted out based on their favorite novels.16
Playing with dolls was another favorite pastime. When South Carolinian Rose Ravenel’s dolls were lost during the early days of the Civil War, her governess cut out paper dolls as a substitute. Ravenel and her siblings also enjoyed playing with “flower dolls,” which they constructed from inverted flowers, using straw or grass for arms and legs (the petals were the dolls’ dresses, and “dolls had narrow skirts or wide skirts as each flower came in season”). These makeshift dolls afforded Ravenel and her sister, Lizzie, many hours of pleasure. “We amused ourselves by telling their histories,” she recalled, explaining, “they had many adventures[;] I would bring a large family of snowdrops to visit Lizzie’s Periwencle’s [sic].” Before the Civil War, southern girls had more elaborate dolls, like the “pretty wax doll” that Anna Rosalie Quitman’s sister received as a gift from her father in 1852.17
Whether they were elaborate or simple, dolls were important to southern girls. What eleven-year-old Virginian Katie Darling Wallace called “playing babies” encouraged girls to practice their adult roles. Girls sewed clothing for their dolls, nursed them when they were sick, and even said bedtime prayers for them. Such activities were clearly modeled on their mothers’ behavior and foreshadowed girls’ responsibilities to their own families in the future. Doll play could teach lessons about race and class, as well as about gender. Rose Ravenel remembered that she and her sister had “hickory nut dolls as mammers [i.e., mammies] for our flower dolls.” Even in the realm of imagination, southern girls understood that enslaved black people served privileged white ones.18
Dolls enabled girls to play at courtship and married life, as well as at motherhood and housekeeping. Mississippian Anna Rosalie Quitman had an extensive collection of dolls that included both “gentlemen” and “Ladies.” In addition to sewing clothing and holding tea parties for her dolls, Quitman acted as her dolls’ scribe, recording “all my dolls letters” to each other. Clearly modeled on letters that Quitman’s mother and sisters received from female relatives and read aloud to the family, these letters suggest Quitman’s awareness of southern women’s adult roles. The letters begin with an exchange between “Mansfield Lowell” and his fiancĂ©e “Josephine.” Lowell was extremely anxious for the wedd...

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