Gone With the Wind

[Abby]

Who loves this classic book by Margaret Mitchell? How did you like the rather long movie adaptation? Who is your favorite character? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

[QNPoohBear]

I haven't made it to the book but I saw the movie, for research purposes for a paper I was writing on antebellum southern women and ideas of womanhood. I read that Scarlett is a myth and real women were nothing like that. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore
There was nothing at all likeable about her and I actually felt sorry for Rhett Butler for awhile. I didn't like how he ended up though. I also hated Melanie because she was also unrealistic. I wanted to bash their heads together and make one real person.
The topic of the paper changed a bit after that but the research was interesting.

[Abby]

I just watched for the dresses. ;) (JK, I've still only seen segments of the movie, but my favorite part of watching it WAS seeing the beautiful dresses and gowns they wore!)

[Marie]

I saw the movie for the first time at the age of six, in accordance with the law that all girls born in the southern United States see the film before they start school. Sorry... ;)

I did instantly fall in love with the costumes. It made costume design my dream job, but that became less practical as I got older.

Scarlett is maddening, but she's fascinating, and even Rhett is frustrating to an extent. I never have liked Melanie or Ashley. I will say, for anyone who has already seen the movie and is interested in reading the book, they are vastly different. I've seen some people love both, but most seem to have a preference. I've always preferred the movie, but I had already seen it so many times my the time I was old enough to read the book in middle school, that I was disappointed by how different it was. The book isn't bad at all, but I didn't care for some of the original story lines.

[``Laurie]

QNPoohBear wrote: "I haven't made it to the book but I saw the movie, for research purposes for a paper I was writing on antebellum southern women and ideas of womanhood. I read that Scarlett is a myth and real women..."

You might want to read the book Mary Chestnut's Civil War by C. Vann Woodward.

Mary Chestnut was a real southern belle who was married to a wealthy planter. She kept a diary through out the civil war and since her husband was in politics she knew everyone who was anyone in that era and voices her opinions freely.

I've found it to be a fascinating first hand look at life during the civil war.

[QNPoohBear]

Laurie wrote: "Mary Chestnut was a real southern belle who was married to a wealthy planter. She kept a diary through out the civil war and since her husband was in politics she knew everyone who was anyone in that era and voices her opinions freely. "

I've read excerpts from Mary Chestnut and Fanny Kemble's diaries. A classmate wrote an undergrad thesis about plantation women's letters and diaries. I could have done a better job with the topic than she did in her draft but I have more writing experience than she did. I chose to go in a different direction and look at women journalists who wrote publicly about politics. Mary Chestnut never wrote anything for the public, as far as I know. She was confined by the ideal of the southern woman. I was intrigued by a mere mention in an article I read by Elizabeth Varon. I also was snowed in and couldn't travel to take a look at some special collections so I had to use what I had available.

[``Laurie]

I wish you would share this paper with us if possible QPoohBear. While you opine that Mary Chestnut was confined by the idea of the southern woman I find Mary Chestnut as a woman true to her time and era. This was before the advent of birth control pills and feminism - therefore women living in this era were very different from modern women.

[QNPoohBear]

I can share an abstract of my paper and my bibliography. I looked at the ideal of true womanhood and how southern female political non-fiction writers justified their interest in politics with the ideal of true womanhood. Two of the women came from elite plantation families but it was obvious they were intelligent and informed on the issues of the day. I'll find the sources I looked at and didn't use too. Start with Scarlett's Sisters and Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Anne Frior Scott wrote the definitive book on southern true womanhood. I had to dig a little deeper and read books by Elizabeth Varon and Janet L. Coryell.

[``Laurie]

Thanks QNP, this does sound very interesting :D

[QNPoohBear]

Recommended authors for reading on southern women:
The free women of Petersburg : status and culture in a southern town, 1784-1860 by Suzanne Lebsock. New York : Norton, c1984 – independent, free, working women in Petersburg, VA
Suzanne Lebsock analysis of public records that "women in Petersburg experienced increasing autonomy, autonomy in the sense of freedom from utter dependence on particular men. Relatively speaking, fewer women were married, more women found work for wages, and more married women acquired separate estates.” (24)

Lebsock writes, "that an ideology that tried to fix the boundaries of women's sphere should have become pervasive and urgent just as women began to exercise a few choices. . . . As women acquired new degrees of power and autonomy in the private sphere, they were confronted with new forms of subordination in the public sphere.28 (24)

McCurry, Stephanie. “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4, Mar., 1992, 1245-1264.

Kerrison, Katherine. Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American
South. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Elizabeth Moss – domesticity spread to elite, white women through novels, to southerners through newspaper editors, politicians, regional spokesmen – rejected reform

Christine Anne Farnham – southern education

In 1970, Anne Firor Scott built on Julia Cherry Spurill’s 1938 volume on women’s lives in the American South. Scott examined the image and reality of southern ladies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argued that the image of the true lady as selfless and giving was a myth and that many women struggled with their identities as ladies and tried to free themselves from the expectations placed on them. Other historians of the 1970s also sought to understand how the “Cult of True Womanhood” really affected women’s lives.

Paula Baker’s article “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920” is the first article that looks at the ways in which women were shaped by and shaped American government and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baker argued that women had a distinct political culture that expanded the women’s sphere and political domesticity became the basis for women’s political culture after the Civil War. The rise of the two-party political system created a new interest in partisan politics from which women were excluded; however, women had more informal methods of influencing politics.

Protestant evangelism elevated nineteenth century women as models of morality and women used their role as moral guardians to become involved in activities of benevolent moral reform. Southern gender especially focused on the ideology of “true womanhood.” Elizabeth Varon was the first to focus on Southern women and reform. She found that Virginia women were involved in causes that related to the protection of women and children. Jean Bryant agrees that women were active participants who shaped history. Southern women, motivated by religious and moral concerns, engaged in benevolent works to aid the deserving poor. They also participated in more controversial reforms such as colonization societies for freed slaves and lobbied to pass colonization legislation. Bryant suggests that this type of reform activism paved the way for women to enter partisan politics in ways that were appropriate for women of the time. Benevolent moral reform provided women with a political outlet within the confines of domesticity.

Elizabeth’s Varon’s seminal work, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia, was the first to put forth that idea that women took an active part in the political campaigns of the antebellum era. Virginia women became active participants in party politics starting with the election of 1840.The Whig party actively wooed women to become involved in politics as mediators and partisans. “Whig womanhood” embodied all the notions of femininity: women would help form Whig families and bring their morality to the public sphere for only the Whig party could protect the citizens of the nation. Women also translated the rhetoric of domesticity to their political activities.

The feminist and Civil Rights movements influenced historians to look more closely at marginalized people of the South. Present scholars now focus on how varying aspects shaped the lives, relationships and political culture of the South. Historians now believe that intellectual institutions helped spread ideas among the southern elite. Writing was one of the few occupations available for “true women” of the antebellum south, particularly for widows in need of money to support their families. Some women used the opportunity to use their periodicals as a venue to express their beliefs on political issues during a time when it was not acceptable for women to speak publicly.

Janet Coryell coined the term “woman politico” to refer to “a person actively engaged in politics and the affairs of national leadership but concerned more with the intricacies of partisan politics than the actual business of government.” (Coryell 2000, 85) Woman politicos did not fight against gender restrictions or discuss women’s concerns. Nor did they choose to interest themselves in domestic feminism, taking a moral approach to reforming the nation.

There's a lot more on gender studies and American women's history.

[QNPoohBear]

Not!Scarletts: amazing antebellum southern women:

Mary Chase Barney
in November, 1831, Mrs. Mary Barney issued the first number of her political and literary monthly, called the National Magazine or Lady's Companion.
Thrashed Jackson and the Democrats 1831

Mary Edwards Bryan, literary editor , Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader, Washington, Penfield and Atlanta, Ga. 1834-1861)
Editor of Semi-Weekly Times, Natchitoches, La. 1859-1873

Mrs. Sidney D. Bumpass the Weekly Message (women’s magazine), Greensboro, NC 1855

Martha Haines Butt –anti-feminist

Dictionary of Virginia Biography (2011, January 14). Martha Haines Butt (1833–1871). Retrieved READ_DATE, from Encyclopedia Virginia: http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/B....

novelist, poet, and essayist who in 1853 became one of five southern women to respond to Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) with a novel of her own. Antifanaticism: A Tale of the South (1853) defended slavery as moral and Christian.

She championed women's intellectual engagement but criticized efforts on behalf of women's rights, generally affirming the traditional role of women.

attended Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott's Mills, Howard County, Maryland.
In April 1850 Butt's essay on the "Influence of Music" appeared in the Patapsco Young Ladies' Magazine.

In the preface Butt described herself as "a warm-hearted Virginian" determined to defend southern society against Stowe's charge that the cruelty of slavery had undermined the region's morality.

Published essays in northern papers – hard to identify

In 1855 Butt became a contributing editor of two short-lived periodicals published by women, the Kaleidoscope, a weekly established by Rebecca Brodnax Hicks in Petersburg, and the Ladies' Repository, a monthly published in Richmond by a woman known only by the pseudonym Lillie Linden. When controversy arose about the Ladies' Repository, apparently concerning its financial practices, Butt publicly severed all connection with the journal.

Rebecca Broadnax Hicks – novelist and editor, The Kaleidoscope Jan. 1855-1857 – editorialized the duties of literary women in the South and duties of south to literary women women’s rights– alienated from society
The Kaleidoscope : a family journal, devoted to literature, temperance and education. : (Petersburg, Va.) 1855-1857
"She Considereth a field and buyeth it, and with the fruit of her hand she planteth a vineyard."
Description based on: Vol. 1, no. 2 (Jan. 24, 1855).
Edited by Rebecca Brodnax Hicks.
Issued weekly during 1855, and monthly thereafter.
Temperance paper.

Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays
Louisa S. McCord was born in South Carolina in 1810 to Langdon Cheeves, plantation owner and Speaker of the House of Representatives (1814) and his wife Mary Elizabeth Dulles Cheeves. Educated at a young ladies’ school in Philadelphia, she was instructed subjects more commonly taught to boys. After the family’s return to South Carolina, she married
David James McCord, a banker. During the1840s and 1850s, Louisa S. McCord wrote
essays on the issues of race, gender and class from the conservative viewpoint.

n 1848 her husband asked her to translate Bastiat's Sophimes Économiques, an essay which argued against protective tariffs, and her skilled translation attracted the attention of editors who solicited her essays on economics, politics, slavery, and women's rights. Most of these essays appeared anonymously or with only her initials, for Louisa McCord's contemporaries would have considered it highly indelicate for a woman to publish on such controversial issues. In her work, she defended slavery and argued that women should have access to education but refrain from public life, writing that "woman was made for duty, not for fame."
http://www.librarycompany.org/women/p...

Maria Henrietta Pinckney. 1782-1836 – States’ rights 1830
Southern pamphlets on secession, November 1860-April 1861

Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832-1899)
– woman of intelligence should contribute to society in a credible manner
Writer –fiction and poetry
Contributed to Southern Parlor Magazine and Ladies Book
Wanted recognition but realized she could not advance in society if too independent
Wanted to attend inauguration of Buchanan
Looked to politics as an entrée into society
1856 campaigned for Fillmore (Know-Nothing)
voiced opinions in public –“acknowledged women were proscribed rightly and properly from participating in actual duty of politics.” – catered to audience
(Queen of the Confederacy: the innocent deceits of Lucy Holcombe Pickens
By Elizabeth Wittenmyer Lewis Denton, University of Texas Press, 2002
Not scholarly Biography )

Lydia Broadnax Hicks – wrote editorial condemning women’s rights Feb. 1855 – believes one great power of women was to influence men (Varon, 1998)

Elizabeth Blair Lee of Missouri – d.o presidential advisor, sister to Postmaster General and congressman, raised in partisan household – moved to DC and married naval officer
Tried to influence politicians’ opinions, held salon to influence matters of patronage appointments and other matters that concerned her—limited by martial status to home
Domestic rhetoric (Coryell 2000, 95)
(born June 20, 1818, Kentucky; died September 13, 1906)
grew up in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Md., immersed in the politics of the day. A favorite of Andrew Jackson, "Lizzie" lived in the White House for a time to please him. After she married Samuel Phillips Lee, a naval officer, in 1843, she often wrote to him keeping him up to date not only on family matters but also on local and national politics, much of which were gathered through the comments of her father, editor of the Democratic organ, the Globe, and her brothers, Montgomery Blair, postmaster general under Lincoln, and Francis "Frank" Preston Blair, Jr., a general in the Civil War. Also, her political interests included serving as her father's amanuensis and sometime ghostwriter of his speeches.

Jane McManus Storms Cazneau – journalist wrote pro-Texas annexation from behind Mexican lines during Mexican war and Lobbied three successive administrations for Cuban annexation – wrote under pen-name, also under Storms, husband’s first name and under second husband’s name – wrote for NY Sun
b. in NY
She was the daughter of Congressman William McManus and Catharine (Coons) McManus. She attended Troy Female Seminary, one of the earliest colleges for women, but did not graduate.
Cazneau began her affiliation with Texas, after the Mexican government granted her land in Texas to bring families as part of Stephen F. Austin’s colony.
During the Mexican War, Cazneau became a war correspondent, playing an unofficial role in her friend and New York Sun editor Moses Yale Beach’s peace mission to Mexico City.