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5 Belles, Wives, and Public Lives, Part I Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair In the early twentieth-century South, public activists like Belle Kearney or career women like Helen Keller and Anne Walter Fearn were clearly the exceptions among southern white women. Far more typical were the husbanddirected , husband-centered lives of Mary Hamilton and Agnes Anderson. Marriage was the nearly universal career for which young women were prepared by families, schools, and churches, and by their own elaborated, often romanticized expectations, formed not only by these institutions but by the fiction and popular media that portrayed courtship and wedding as the pivotal moments in a woman’s life. In some respects the iconic southern belle and lady, ensconced upon a pedestal, was even more determinedly idealized in fiction and film seventy -five years after the Civil War than she had been when, purportedly, Confederate gallants rode off to defend her and their homeland against the Yankees. Not surprisingly, white women with at least middle-class opportunities were the ones who were most likely to idealize an image of the popular belle, the privileged creature who attracted men with her beauty and charm and, having her pick among aspiring suitors, could thus ascend to glowing bride. Scarlett O’Hara of the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind emerged not from history , however, but from the artistic imagination of Margaret Mitchell. Scarlett is an archetype who has come to epitomize the persisting image of the young southern white woman as a beauty whose attention is focused solely upon attracting men. Of course, Mitchell also portrayed a life that demanded more intelligence and endurance than was required of the giddy belle. The stable, grounding qualities of Ellen O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes manifest the attributes of a “lady,” representing moral purity, self-sacrifice, and, above all, de126 Belles, Wives, and Public Lives, Part I: Sinclair  127 votion to family. Even Scarlett eventually outgrows belledom, although it has always required a stretch of the imagination to suppose that the flirtatious coquette could suddenly meld with a genteel lady—indeed Rhett Butler insists that she cannot. Nonetheless, the combination of belle and lady has proved over many years to be an unflagging image of a certain romanticized ideal of southern white womanhood, albeit an ideal firmly grounded in its incarnation of white privilege. Why this particular image of southern womanhood, with its backward glance toward courtly love, cavaliers, and antebellum plantations should maintain its saliency so long after its mid-nineteenth-century heyday is a question one might well raise with the autobiographers who are the subjects of this chapter , women who led long lives of significant participation in the major social and political movements of their time, educated women of influence and ambition well beyond the domestic sphere. These are women who were reared in expectation of a career of marriage, who did marry influential men and shared their active public lives, and who, in fact, in several instances achieved prominence themselves. One of the more interesting aspects of their narratives is the composition or presentation of a youthful self who is identified as distinctly “southern.” In portraying their younger selves, these narrators furnish the reader with many examples of what behaviors and social influences are perceived as constituting southernness, or at least constituting a white, middleand upper-class “southern” girlhood. Even more, these life stories suggest their authors’ assumptions about their and their society’s ideas of what distinctive features characterize exemplary white womanhood. Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair, Virginia Foster Durr, Corinne Claiborne Boggs, and Lylah Scarborough Barber were born within two generations of one another, the oldest in 1883, and the youngest in 1916. They grew up in the Deep South: Sinclair in Mississippi, Durr in Alabama, Boggs in Louisiana, and Barber in north Florida. All four moved away during their early married years, although they maintained connections with family and home. Craig Sinclair never returned for more than a few short visits to Mississippi, living in southern California and Arizona for nearly a half century. Virginia Durr, on the other hand, after nearly twenty years in Washington, D.C., during the Roosevelt and Truman years and a brief residence in Denver, returned to Montgomery. In the ensuing years she witnessed and often participated in the civil rights movement unfolding around her. Lindy Boggs left Louisiana in 1940 at the age of twentyfour to accompany her husband Hale Boggs to Washington, where he would take his seat in the Congress as representative...

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