Scott, Anne F. The Southern

Scott, Anne F. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. University of Virginia Press, 1995.

Historian Anne Scott's The Southern Lady is a text designed to question the image of the delicate, submissive Southern belle that has become a fixture of American popular culture. According to Scott, Southern women were active in the Progressive movements of 19th century, and lobbied actively for their right to vote. Scott divides her work into two sections: life before slavery and life after slavery, and attempts to show that Southern women were necessary and vital parts of the region's economy during both time periods. Women were often forced to manage vast estates during the antebellum period, and afterwards women used religious and social groups to mobilize to obtain the vote.

Scott's book is almost exclusively on white Southern women. While this is not an inherent weakness of the book, it could be made more explicit. After all, African-American Southern women were never treated as shrinking violets during the slavery regime. Scott's work often has the tone of being a defense of the region: Scott is a proud Southerner, and a member of the League of Women Voters. Both aspects of her life inform her work. Scott includes incidents from her family history, especially at the end of the book, which can make the tone of the work seem overly gentle when chronicling what was, after all, a repressive regime. However, her story is also an important counterweight to many images of the old South as entirely male-dominated, an image that was detrimental to white women as well as African-Americans of both genders.

According to Scott, Southern women were far more radical than is often assumed, certainly more than their husbands, although few were active abolitionists. But Scott does admit that there was a powerful social ethos that emphasized the need for a woman to learn the 'tools' to catch a husband. Spinsterhood was considered a social death, and it was often stressed to girls that the only way that they could win a husband was to be submissive, and make it seem as if they had no will of their own. But women were members of voting organizations, just like Northern women, writes Scott -- even if they attended in white gloves.

While Scott's work is valuable in that it chronicles the lives of many influential Southern women, whose voices would otherwise be lost to history, certain aspects of her thesis seem contradictory. She is eager to stress Sothern women's strength, but some of the diaries she quotes chronicle the voices of girls constantly felt pressured repress their opinions to maintain marital bliss. In her conclusion, she speaks of Harriet Simmons, whom she saw as an example of how women of high social standing could "get away with being radical" (Scott 239). But the fact that women were forced to 'get away' with being radicals, rather than openly espousing such an ideal is telling of the oppression still felt by many Sothern women.