Women of the American South

A Multicultural Reader

Christie Anne Farnham

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814728406
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Among the most prominent icons of the American south is that of the southern belle, immortalized by such figures as Scarlett O'Hara, Dolly Madison, and Lucy Pickens (whose elegant image graced the Confederate $100 bill). And yet the women of America's south iave always defied pat generalization, no more readily forced into facle categories than women in the country's other regions.
Never before has a book of southern history so successfully integrated the experiences of white and non-white women. Among the myriad subjects addressed in the book are black women's suffrage, the economic realities of Choctaw women, female kin and female slaves in planters's wills, the northern myth of the rebel girl, second wave feminism in the South, and southern lesbians. Bringing to light the lives of Cherokee women, Appalachian "coal daughters," and Jewish women in the South, the essays all but one published in this book for the first time, ensure that monolithic representations of southern womanhood are a thing of the past.
Filling a crucial gap in southern history and women's history, Women of the American South is a valuable reference and pedagogical aid for a wide range of scholars and students.

Chapter One

Writing the History of Southern Women

Anne Firor Scott

EDITOR’S NOTE: History as a profession with recognized evidentiary standards based on research in primary documents developed only toward the end of the nineteenth century. The conventional view held that history was about change; therefore, it was thought that men made history, women being confined to an unchanging round of domestic activities. Even when a rare book focused on women, like Julia Cherry Spruill’s Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (1938), it gathered dust on library shelves.

That all changed with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement and feminism. An increasing number of women had moved into graduate training in the fifties, taking advantage of opportunities for women in higher education in the post-World War II era. Consequently they were well positioned to write women’s history when their engagement in civil rights and feminism opened their eyes to the omission of over half of the world’s population from the pages of history. The result was what often has been described as an “explosion” of studies in women’s history.

Yet southern women, with the exception of elite white women and female slaves, received less attention. Historians of the South were drawn by their engagement in civil rights struggles and concern with black nationalism to focus on African American men, and historians of women were involved in developing interpretations drawn largely from the experiences of northeastern middle-class white women. By the mid-eighties, however, this was beginning to change. Inspired by a rapidly developing scholarship on black women, scholars writing on southern women began expanding their concerns to a wider range of subjects.

This essay is adapted from a much longer one called “Unfinished Business” published in the Journal of Women’s History 8 (summer 1996): 111–21 and used here by permission.

One reason was that increasing numbers of women being trained as historians were members or descendants of these excluded groups. If we are to a large degree creatures of our cultures, the admission to the profession of persons from a wide range of backgrounds — the democratization of history — guarantees that limited views of any one group will be challenged by the work of another. This is not to say that each group is seeking to dominate the historical record with its own political identity and agenda or that one interpretation of history is as good as any other. Rather, historians put forward for consideration interpretations, driven in part by their own experiences and perspectives but based on documentation, which the entire profession then judges by its evidentiary standards.

In addition, each generation asks new questions drawn from its own experiences in a changing world, enlarging our understanding of the complex nature of historical truth. The complete truth may never be attained, but the democratization of the profession and its commitment to evidentiary standards bring that goal close to realization. The following essay by Anne Firor Scott, a founder of southern women’s history, combines the story of her own background and contemporary influences with the larger narrative of attempts to preserve southern women’s history and establish it as a legitimate subfield within the discipline.

I suppose the writing of southern women’s history may be said to have begun in 1861, when a woman writing under the name Mary Forrest (her real name was Julia Deane Freeman) published Women of the South Distinguished in Literature, a collection of carefully researched biographies of writers. In the last half of the nineteenth century the southern writers who might be said to have dealt with the history of women were those who wrote memoirs and novels; no male historian, academic or amateur, paid any attention to women. In the Reconstruction years the Daughters of the Confederacy collected and preserved documents; in 1920 the organization published a fascinating volume called Representative Women of the South, which, after a flowery introduction, turned out to be a rather thorough documentation of women’s public activities. When U. B. Phillips came to write his history of slavery in the 1920s, he paid some attention to white women.¹

The first effort to produce a scholarly monograph came in the late 1920s, when, for reasons now lost to sight, a young woman studying at the University of Wisconsin decided to write her dissertation on the subject of antebellum southern women. Virginia Gearhart had been an honors student at Goucher, a school notable for faculty women with a strong community orientation. Gearhart, a Marylander, thought of herself as a southerner, and her pioneering research is punctuated now and then with familiar southern mythology.² Still, in view of the total absence of any secondary literature in her chosen field, she made a brave beginning. In the 1930s came the work of two first-rate scholars, Julia Cherry Spruill and Guion Griffis Johnson, and two others whose work was impressive, Marjorie Mendenhall and Eleanor Boatwright. Though all five of these women wrote important scholarly articles or books, none of them, as far as I can tell, had the slightest impact on those who controlled the teaching and writing of southern history. Not only was their excellent scholarship ignored, but not one was able to find an academic post worthy of her talents. Each worked out such accommodations as she could. Boatwright and Mendenhall were cut off in their prime, one by suicide, the other by a medical error. Of the three who lived a normal life span, one spent her life as a manuscript librarian, one as an organizer of women’s associations (while she wrote history on the side), and one as a Christian Science reader. Their work was excellent, but it was in an area not yet recognized by the gatekeepers as a legitimate field of study.³

Fortunately the printed word does not perish as readily as the people who write, and much of this work was destined to reappear when there were people ready to listen. This time began to come in the 1960s.⁴

By then the context in which southern history was being written was changing rapidly. The Second World War had brought numbers of southern women into the labor force, the armed services, and other places. If they went home immediately after the war, they did not necessarily stay there long. More and more young women were going to college. Organizations like the League of Women Voters were growing rapidly, and by the early 1950s league members were joining southern white church women in actively preparing for school integration. Before long southern women were publicly taking sides in the debate about school integration.

It was my good fortune to come upon evidence for the post-Civil War emergence of southern women as a political force just in time to benefit from this changing contemporary context. I was asked to present a paper called “The ‘New Woman’ in the New South” to the 1961 meeting of the Southern Historical Association. It was the first dealing with the history of southern women to appear on the program of that august body, and probably the second on the subject ever presented to a learned society in this country. (In 1951 Elizabeth Taylor had given a paper on the Texas suffrage movement to the Mississippi Valley Historical Society.) The paper was warmly received by a generous audience (mostly male), so generous, indeed, that I was emboldened to submit it to the South Atlantic Quarterly, where, after what I later learned had been a spirited debate, it was accepted and published.

Nine years later The Southern Lady, the book foreshadowed by that paper, came out—only a step ahead, as it turned out, of what became an avalanche of work on the subject.⁵ This acceleration of interest reflected the continuing change in the context: by 1970 young southern women had been exhilarated and energized by the Civil Rights Movement. The gentle breeze that preceded the hurricane of feminism had begun to blow.⁶ Numbers of women began to enter history graduate programs, boldly proposing to study the history of their own sex.

So it came to be that the subject that had merited three citations in the index of a 1965 work on southern historiography by Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick filled more than fifty pages in its successor in 1987.⁷ I wonder whether any new field in the discipline has ever grown so rapidly. Like our predecessors, the twentieth-century historians of women have been profoundly concerned with social and political issues and with our own status. For this reason more than in most other subfields of American history, our books, even at their most scholarly, speak to women who are not historians.⁸

We may have reached a point at which the study of women’s history has become self-propelling, less dependent, perhaps, on a favorable context, for though feminism itself is under attack and often declared to be dead—a rumor that is vastly exaggerated—feminist scholars continue to produce books, articles, and monographs and organize panels with unabated enthusiasm.

The field continues to grow both in substance—new questions are constantly being raised, new groups and individuals being studied—and in theoretical sophistication. Some current developments in the field include the strong emphasis on theory, a good deal of crossover from literary criticism, the extraordinary burgeoning of black women’s history, and the ever increasing interest in lower-class women, farmers’ wives, and the like. What elements in the present context encourage these particular developments. To examine that issue would require another essay as long as this one.⁹

For the moment, perhaps, it is enough to say that over its long history—since Judith Sergeant Murray began to draft her essays in 1776—women’s history has developed in close relationship with women’s activism and has itself affected that activism, providing the basis for many efforts to broaden women’s world. Also, from the beginning it has run on its own track, ignored by the so-called mainstream (mostly male) historians. The first characteristic continues to this day and perhaps accounts in part for the extraordinary amount of work accomplished since 1960. The second is, I believe, beginning to change. Perhaps the day is not far distant when every scholar working in a relevant field will pay close attention to women’s records as well as men’s.

History is always unfinished. It is necessary to remember that what we are doing today will be seen as equally unfinished fifty years from now. Historians writing over the years have done the best they knew how (and we should not for a moment suggest that they were any less intelligent or perceptive than we are). We write by our lights, as they did by theirs. As Charles Darwin once remarked to his friend and codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, “the firmest conviction of the truth of a doctrine by its author seems, alas, not to be the slightest guarantee of its truth.” Many of the formulations that seem to us so exactly to tell the truth about the past will probably be discarded by the next generation of scholars on the basis of new evidence, new insights, new theories.

More and more we are recognizing how important it is to understand the background and experience from which any historian views her or his chosen subject. Perhaps my own case is instructive. Faced with the challenge of writing an afterword for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Southern Lady, I began to reflect on the context of my life and what it had to do with my work. The first thing I realized was that the context was not confined to the actual years since I was born, but in many ways began long before.

Growing up in the 1920s, I was surrounded by white southern women, some of whom considered themselves ladies. As children must, I absorbed offhand, giveaway comments of grown-ups. Once I spoke of a black woman I admired as a lady; I was reproved. Long after her death I discovered that my grandmother, whose picture appears on the cover of the new edition, fitted almost exactly the description I had worked out from the records of many of her contemporaries: a description of well-to-do, highly respectable southern girls who yearned for education, made do with what they could persuade their parents to provide, and created careers in church work and voluntary associations. My grandmother was a Virginian named Byrd Lee Hill. Her father and her planter grandfather had been Confederate officers. Her mother, already an orphan when the Civil War began, had found herself almost destitute when one brother wound up in a Yankee prison and the other in the army. She had applied for a job in the Confederate treasury. Whether she got the job is not clear, but she had married John Booten Hill while the war went on. Byrd Lee, the only daughter, was born in 1869 and grew up with a high measure of intellectual ambition. She yearned to go to college, but had to settle for a teacher’s college. She had married young, had five children, was a pillar of her church and an active member of the Browning club, helped some black clubwomen set up a day care center, and—after suffrage—traveled through Georgia organizing branches of the newly created League of Women Voters.

She didn’t like to keep house, my mother said, but loved to read and write. Her patriarchal father-in-law ordered her not to sign articles she wrote for the local paper. Yet she had enough independence to stay with her own church instead of joining her husband’s. She died when I was five, but the stories I heard about her captured my imagination.

As I grew up, there were others who shaped my understanding of southern women: the hardworking farm wives who were everywhere in Georgia before the Second World War, four of my college teachers, a black woman who came to nurse my little brothers and then went to college. She came home to become a schoolteacher.

Much of this effort to unravel my own past as it fits into the larger past is described in the afterword to the new edition. Even there I’m sure I have only begun to address what an all-seeing eye could discern. How, I wondered, as I tried to decipher my own development and relate it to all that came later, does anyone dare to try to reconstruct the past?

But we do and we will continue to, but clearly it must be with a certain tentativeness, a decent humility. There is, as I said, a very large amount of work in progress dealing with southern women. Many surprises are in store, much discussion and argument will ensue. Above all it is clear that the history of southern women is only beginning to be written.

NOTES

1. Mary Forrest, Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1860); Mrs. Bryan Wells Collier, Biographies of Representative Women of the South, 6 vols. (n.p., n.d.). Memoirs, particularly those focused on the Civil War, abounded in the years after the war. Novelists whose work is enlightening include Sarah Barnwell Elliott, George Washington Cable, Grace King, Charles Chesnutt (for black women), and later Ellen Glasgow.

2. Virginia Gearhart, “The Southern Woman, 1840–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1927).

3. For an extended analysis of the lives and work of these women, see Anne Firor Scott, ed., Unheard Voices: The First His...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Writing the History of Southern Women
• 2 From Corn Mothers to Cotton Spinners: Continuity in Choctaw Women’s Economic Life, A.D. 950-1830
• 3 Struggle for Survival: Non-Elite White Women in Lowcountry Georgia, 1790-1830
• 4 Cherokee Women and Cultural Change
• 5 The Politics of Pedagogy and Judaism in the Early Republican South: The Case of Rachel and Eliza Mordecai
• 6 Equality Deferred, Opportunity Pursued: The Sisters of Wachovia
• 7 According to His Wish and Desire: Female Kin and Female Slaves in Planter Wills
• 8 The Northern Myth of the Rebel Girl
• 9 “Stand by Your Man”: The Ladies Memorial Association and the Reconstruction of Southern White Manhood
• 10 Susannah and the Elders or Potiphar’s Wife? Allegations of Sexual Misconduct at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute
• 11 Waiting for the Millennium, Remembering the Past: Appalachian Women in Time and Place
• 12 “Most Sacrificing” Service: The Educational Leadership of Lucy Craft Laney and Mary McLeod Bethune
• 13 Black Women’s Culture of Resistance and the Right to Vote
• 14 Renegotiating Liberty: Garveyism, Women, and Grassroots Organizing in Virginia
• 15 A New Deal for Southern Women: Gender and Race in Women’s Work Relief
• 16 Searching for Southern Lesbian History
• 17 Second Wave Feminism(s) and the South: The Difference That Differences Make
• Contributors
• Index