Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women's Colleges, 1884-1945

5. The Absent Presence of Race

109 YZ 5 The Absent Presence of Race The southern public colleges for women were founded in an era when, in both popular and scholarly parlance, to be “southern” meant to be white. Prior to the Civil War, southern identity coalesced around the race question as the region sought to defend—and began to define itself through—its peculiar institution. In the 1880s, new South leaders, while beginning to acknowledge the wrongs of slavery, also sought to rehabilitate antebellum southern society and tacitly justify white supremacy. During what has been termed the nadir of race relations in America, from roughly the end of Reconstruction through the end of World War I, this white supremacy was codified and enforced in the South through both Jim Crow laws and organized violence against African Americans. By 1928, historian Ulrich B. Phillips could declare that the central theme in southern history and “cardinal test” of a southerner was “a common resolve indomitably maintained—that [the South] shall be and remain a white man’s country” (31). Even scholars more pessimistic about antebellum life and less sanguine about the effects of slavery, white supremacy, and segregation took this as a given; for W. J. Cash, the southern “mind” was essentially white.1 This distinction held for many through the Civil Rights era, as white segregationists reappropriated Civil War symbols in a bitter battle to cling to a racialized regional identity that excluded black participation, and scholars continue to debate the extent to which this racialized discourse remains resonant today.2 110 T h e A b sent P r esence o f Race Though white women were not visibly at the forefront of organized opposition to African American civil rights, they did play an important role in crafting the racialized southern identity and symbols that lay behind it. Following the Civil War, southern white women found themselves in a society in which traditional privileges of race, class, and even gender no longer applied. In negotiating their way through this changing social order, many sought to “fashion the new out of as much of the old as could survive” (Faust, Mothers of Invention 8), taking leading roles in Confederate memorial associations, preservation societies, and campaigns to erect public monuments to the war, as well as writing, sponsoring, and providing an audience for histories sympathetic to the southern cause. These historically minded activities—concomitant with a larger, national movement of expanding women’s civic participation in the Progressive era—provided women with new forms of cultural power even as they legitimated traditional gender roles as well as race and class privileges. In memorializing and celebrating the Lost Cause, women did not simply reaffirm their role as caretakers of culture but helped shape what it meant to be southern in the new South. Indeed, scholars have long debated the extent to which southern white women after the Civil War were complicit in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers (Bishir; Brundage; Censer; Faust, Mothers of Invention; J. Johnson, Southern Ladies; Whites). Yet few scholars have examined college women’s activities in this regard, particularly those of the southern public college for women, designed for young women of more modest circumstances. As public education in the South was nearly universally segregated by race, these colleges were set up with a shared, explicitly race-conscious ideology, promising to nurture young white women and prepare them for public life even as they sheltered them from “outside” influences, including interaction with black men and women, particularly men. At the same time, as we have seen, these schools quickly proved themselves to be poor agents of legislative and even community will, expanding women’s rights and roles and even serving as vehicles of progressive social change. Though emerging out of a new South economic order, the southern public women’s colleges had their antecedents in antebellum southern ideals, which, though honoring higher education for white women, valued it less for its practical effects than as a status marker, signaling a lady “worthy of protection, admiration, and chivalrous attention” (Farnham 3). This legacy could be a double-edged sword, as Amy Thompson McCandless finds in her own broad survey of women’s education in the twentieth-century South: T h e A b sent...