Earline's Pink Party: The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman by Elizabeth Findley Shores (review)

Elizabeth Findley Shores explores the life and values of her maternal grandmother, Annie Earline Moore Findley, through public and family records, family stories, material culture, newspapers, and recent scholarship. Shores posits that Findley's father's fecklessness, her mother's hard labors and struggles to keep up appearances, and her own fears of racial violence perpetrated by nearby African Americans instilled in Findley a steely determination to achieve higher social and economic status. Although Shores had few letters and no diaries by Findley, she convincingly argues that Findley and her husband, Herbert Lyman Findley Sr., never questioned a culture of white supremacy based on exaggerated fears of late-nineteenth-century black men and that this background, not the mythic antebellum South, informed their adult values. Shores's conclusion that Earline Findley was an insecure person lacking empathy due to inadequate love as a child seems a leap beyond her evidence. Earline's Pink Party: The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman is a creative family narrative that illuminates the performance of gentility by white southerners before and around the mid-twentieth century.

While becoming a belle had never been an option, Findley could aspire to status as an elite white southern lady. After securing a two-year degree and a teaching position, she married Herbert Findley, a descendant of one of Alabama's pioneer families, the Murchisons. Shores's copiously detailed presentation of Herbert Findley's family stories establishes the role that family stories play in the formation of an individual's identity, but she has surprisingly little to say about the long marriage between Earline and Herbert Findley.

The Findleys' Craftsman home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, completed in 1922, became Earline Findley's fortress and creative outlet, while Herbert Findley enjoyed a wider sphere as a University of Alabama alumnus, a local court judge, and later a professor at the University of Alabama. Shores details Earline Findley's close attention to the home's design, furnishings, and decorations and to its extensive remodeling. These descriptions offer readers with an interest in the history of American interior design and household technology a vision of upper-middle-class material culture from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Earline Findley's home, marriage, and two children—Herbert Lyman Findley Jr. and Anne Elizabeth Findley—eased her social anxiety, but it was primarily Anne Findley's transformation into a midcentury southern belle that fulfilled Earline Findley's aspiration of becoming a genteel member of the white elite. Earline Findley studied etiquette manuals, observed social norms, and created an extensive wardrobe for her daughter, while Anne Findley did her part by learning to play the piano, losing weight to achieve a slender figure, going to college, joining a sorority, making social contacts, and sharing hostess duties with her mother.

Earline Findley commissioned a large formal oil portrait of Anne Findley that featured bare shoulders, a low neckline, glowing white skin, unnatural-looking blue eyes, and blonde hair. This portrait of the brown-haired Anne Findley—the first thing visitors saw upon entering the house—served as the material certification of her belle status. The pinnacle of Earline Findley's quest for social recognition was a tea attended by two hundred people during which Anne Findley, a bridesmaid for the honoree, made her debut as both belle and hostess. The guests crowded into Earline Findley's newly expanded home and encountered pink table decorations and flowers, pink food, Anne Findley in a pink dress, and a pink Christmas tree. Regardless of the guests' perceptions, Earline Findley regarded the pink party as a personal triumph.

Shores maintains that Earline Findley's life was a performance of learned rituals; some ritualized family behaviors from the era include picnics, vacations, listening to the radio, watching television, and attending movies. Other than a reference to Anne and...