On Anne Firor Scott's Turf

Historians who labor in a field often stake out a topic as their own turf. They fence it and defend it—sometimes in scathing reviews—from all trespassers who encroach bearing differing interpretations. Historian Anne Firor Scott understood these turf wars better than did most scholars. She also knew that, at the beginning of her career, the overwhelmingly male historical profession saw the history of women as peripheral to the landscape of U.S. history, a sort of untilled, patchy turf, one that could be mostly ignored, located down past even the lower forty.

The complete neglect of women's history gave Scott some scrubby cover as she toiled in the 1960s on her first book, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970).¹ Even after its publication, some historians might have glanced at the title and assumed that their own turf remained secure. So barren was the field of women's history in 1970 that Scott could stake out a vast swath of space to write a century-long account of white women across the South. Historian A. Elizabeth Taylor's review of The Southern Lady in the Journal of Southern History noted a "dearth of period studies on southern women [w]ith the exception of Julia Cherry Spruill's excellent history of the colonial period" and "several accounts of women during the Civil War."²

Writing one definitive history of middle- and upper-class southern white women would have been an impossible task, but the title is, perhaps deliberately, misleading. Scott was not writing a history of all southern ladies; instead, her goal was to demolish the myth of the southern lady. In prescient ways, Scott dismantled that gendered stereotype to dismantle the existence of southern women's frailty, which historians had argued justified patriarchal protection, or to undermine prevailing accounts of Confederate women's universal willingness to sacrifice during the Civil War. Instead, Scott

Anne Firor Scott, in 1992. Courtesy of Duke University Archives.

emphasized women's discontent with the slaveholding patriarchy and argued that the Civil War provided opportunities for liberation from it. She revealed that postbellum women's organizations brought women into the public sphere and were para-political. Certainly, her interpretation of the southern woman suffrage movement as an instrument for southern reform, rather than solely as a racist campaign to prevent the African American vote, countered standing interpretations.³

Most reviewers recognized and took up the broader implications of The Southern Lady, even if few—for example, A. Elizabeth Taylor—objected to Scott's "convey[ing] the impression that the cult of ladyhood might have been something of a brainwash to keep women submissive and that it was a barrier to their fulfillment as human beings." Taylor gently mourned the "decline in refinement and gentility."⁴ But Bell I. Wiley crafted a wily review that began by establishing "Mrs." Scott's bona fides, referring to her as someone "born and reared in Georgia, who received her doctoral training at Radcliffe under Oscar Handlin, and who is a successful wife, mother, and careerist." He then compared Scott's smashing of the southern lady cult to exploding the myth of the happy slave and approved of both.⁵ Scott proved, as George M. Fredrickson pointed out, women's "undercurrent of discontent with the patriarchal institutions of a slave-holding society."⁶ Gerda Lerner praised the book but gently noted its lack of race and class analysis.⁷

Scott's foremost goal was to make southern white women visible, not to have the last word. Her expansive and provocative work has proved incredibly generative in the almost half-century since its publication. Scott's long chronicle provided a through line to prove that the history of southern white women posed challenges to the accepted account of all of southern history, as well as to the modest outpouring on northeastern women's history, which generally dismissed southern women as an unimportant exception to the larger national narrative. Criticism that she had overemphasized white women's discomfort with slavery and the...