Revisiting the Ruins: A Feminine Retrospective on Dixie's Past

Revisiting the Ruins: A Feminine Retrospective on Dixie's Past Margaret Ripley Wolfe AU of the panelists share the view that the 1995 Program Committee of the Southern Historical Association moved in a positive direction when it decided to include a teacher workshop dealing with the topic of "Southern Women in History and Historiography." Our work as historians would be diminished if we could not share it with interested readers and Usteners. Ultimately, sound historical research should make its way into classrooms at all levels, and the study of women must be more than compensatory; it should not be consigned to sidebars, and it needs to be integrated into the record of the region's and nation's past. Placing southern women's history in the classroom requires the desire to do so and the knowledge to be effective. The source material is avaUable; the will to do it is another matter. Being a feminist (and for the record, a feminist is someone who beUeves in equal rights for women; a feminist can be either male or female), I have made the pilgrimage to Mecca and I have seen the New Jerusalem—that is, I have attended a workshop sponsored by the National Women's History Project in Sonoma, CaUfornia, where the idea for Women's History Week originated, and I have visited the National American Women's Rights Park in Seneca FaUs, New York, where the first Women's Rights Convention in this country was held. Several years ago when I visited there, the roof line of the Wesleyan Chapel where the delegates had met in 1848 remained visible; the front of the chapel, however , had become a laundromat. What symmetry, what poetry! I thought, given the fact that most women have spent a considerable portion of their Uves chained to a washtub or a washing machine. Those of us who claim some expertise in women's history have certainly erected our own shrines, fashioned our own icons, and developed our own ideology. It has become fashionable among some humanities professors to speak of the canon. What they are talking about is some set of standards within a field of learning. I recall with considerable amusement the comment that a friend of mine, a female historian, made whUe she and I were attending a certain conference a few years ago. The program at that particular conference was heavUy under the influence of deconstruction and postmodernism—all of which prompted my cynical friend to sniff that until very recently she had thought that "the southern canon was a gun." © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 176 Journal of Women's History Fall Since the 1970s, the specialty of women's history has emerged and developed, and I have been both a spectator and a participant. I have become acquainted with many of its finest practitioners. Along the way, I have enjoyed the company of first-rate professional women historians. The manner in which they have acquitted themselves, their presentations at meetings, and their pubUcations have contributed immensely to my own career. Knowing them has enriched my life. A goodly number of these women have devoted themselves to lifting southern women from obscurity and contributing to what historian Joan E. Cashin recently caUed "a fast-breaking field." She was referring to southern women's history. For much too long, the nation's and the region's written history was characterized by sexism, ethnocentricity, and classism. Chroniclers, both professional and amateur, once tended to focus on "dead white men," to emphasize the European experience, and to reserve the past for the privileged . Paradoxically, females in the region and in the nation still constitute a numerical majority and a pohtical minority. Achieving equality for the feminine gender in American society is a political objective, and expanding democracy is in keeping with American ideology. Whatever new gains we make must be cherished and protected and claimed as if they are "ancient and sacred privileges." While it is true that women's studies and women's history have political overtones, acknowledging the fact that the personal is political does not obviate the high quality and genuine significance of the research...