Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South - Shirley Abbott

[Luke]

Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, Shirley Abbott, 1983, United States, NONFICTION

"...Shirley Abbot's research encompasses diaries and journals of early Southern immigrants and visitors, family stories, academic histories of the South, and Southern historical fiction, all of which she uses methodically to disentangle Southern myth from history: "Most Southerners, even those who descend from some distinguished old family or another, can also look back, at quite close range, on at least one line of half-literate farmers who scratched their living out of the dirt one way or another and moved along every generation or so, searching or cheap land and sweet water and the chance to start over again."...What is a Southern belle, or, more importantly, what is a Southern belle supposed to be and why?..."

(J.L., p. 264)