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28 Down from the Pedestal The Influence of Anne Scott’s Southern Ladies —laura f. edwards I first read Anne Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics as an undergraduate at Northwestern University in the early 1980s, while writing a paper on the status of antebellum plantation mistresses for a course in U.S. social history. When I selected the topic at the beginning of the quarter, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The only knowledge I had was what I had gleaned from popular culture. I knew the topic was not well studied, but that was why I wanted to do it. The challenge appealed to me. As an undergraduate, however, I relished the idea of the challenge while putting off the work until the end of the quarter. So it was too late to change my mind when I realized that my sense of intellectual adventure was misplaced, given the assignment, which was to write a synthetic paper based on secondary sources. There were even fewer books on southern women than I had anticipated. While other students in the course complained of having too much material, I spent my time on the hunt. I was only moderately successful, cobbling together a collection of readings on southern history (few of which featured women, white or black), women’s history (few of which touched on the South), and an odd assortment of books on white southern women (not all of which were appropriate to the topic). I missed many things I should have read. But I did manage to find The Southern Lady. Anne Scott’s southern ladies were not the ones I expected to find. Instead of passive, self-absorbed belles, I found wives and mothers, thoughtful and articulate, hardworking and tough. They bristled with life, even when confined to their antebellum pedestals. More than that, they were interesting. The problematic elements of their lives—their support for slavery and racism—added to their allure, at least for me, by making them more challenging historical subjects. In fact, these women were so compelling that they made the book’s argument irresistible. Given this The Influence of Anne Scott’s Southern Ladies 29 formidable group of women, it made sense that only significant barriers , namely, the powerful patriarchal structures of the slave South, could keep them in subordination. It made even more sense that they would seize the opportunities available to them once the Civil War and emancipation upended that social structure.1 Unable to imagine another narrative , I wrote a paper that took issue with The Southern Lady because I accepted the analysis so completely. The problem, I argued, was that the book placed too much emphasis on the changes resulting from the Civil War and emancipation. I substantiated that position by showing that white southern women were not as limited before the Civil War as the pedestal metaphor suggests. They participated in a wider world, reading, going to school, traveling, corresponding with friends and family, and maintaining a far-flung network of social contacts. My implication, although not particularly well stated, was that the route from pedestal to politics was explained as much in white women’s antebellum past as it was in the social, economic, and political changes of the Civil War era. Even the structural constraints of the slave South could not have kept Anne Scott’s southern ladies down. How could they? It is painfully obvious now that my paper was based more on desire than on evidence. (I do not think it would have passed muster with Anne for that reason.) But my desire did have a basis in the scholarly literature. Before I read The Southern Lady, I assumed that white women in the slave South were historically marginal. Of any group of Americans in the past, they were the least likely to have influenced the course of U.S. history. I had to reconsider both that presumption and my view of history after I read the book. Once I realized that these women mattered, the past, present, and future also looked much different. Obviously there were possibilities that I had not yet considered—and, as a college student trying to find her own way in life, those possibilities were important. I needed to believe in Anne Scott’s southern ladies. I needed that so badly that I even ignored the assignment, constructing my analysis not from other historians’ findings but...

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