NOTE: To arrange an interview with author Gail Murray, contact John Kerr at (901) 843-3873 or [email protected]
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A Glimpse at Some of the More Outstanding Southern Women of the
Last 100 years
STEEL MAGNOLIAS, OR WHY THE G.R.I.T.S. ARE SO GRITTY
by Gail Murray
Associate Professor of History
Rhodes College
Memphis, TN
O.K., so it was a man, Robert Harling, who popularized the term "Steel Magnolias"in his play by the same title. But this forceful-yet-delicate image of Southern women had permeated fiction, film, and biography long before Julia Roberts and Sally Field popularized the typology.
Today tee-shirts and bumper stickers adorned with "GRITS"(Girls Raised In The South) proclaim identification with southernness as well as the region's traditional food. Like all stereotypes, "steel magnolias" and "GRITS" contain both truth and distortion as they seek to capture the elusive meaning of southern womanhood.
Women in a recent college class suggested these identifying characteristics of southern women: beautiful, gracious, determined, powerful-behind-the-scenes, cultured, family-centered. Less positive were those who listed catty, unliberated, and conformist. As Shirley Abbott once wrote, "to grow up female in the South is to inherit a set of directives that warp one for life." Well, maybe. But within the limitations southern culture has always imposed, many women broke limiting bonds while charming their way to positions of influence.
Although the shadow of the antebellum plantation mistress may fall heavily across the page of southern women's history, no one class, locale, life-style, or race can claim exclusively what it means to be a southern woman. As the century draws to a close, a glimpse of some of the more outstanding southern women of the last hundred years may prove illustrative. All those profiled were born in and lived most of their lives within the borders of the old Confederacy. Many of them, although certainly privileged themselves, decried hierarchy, so they appear in chronological order.
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954 ) Mary Church's parents had been born into slavery, but both pursued successful entrepreneurial careers as freed people in the New South. She grew up in Memphis until her parents' divorce prompted them to send her to boarding school in Antioch, Ohio.
Terrell graduated from Oberlin College and taught school until her marriage to lawyer Robert Terrell of Washington, D. C.,quitting only because the law forbade married women in the classroom. Her family wealth and his position as a district court judge provided the family with all material comforts and status, but Mary Terrell worked tirelessly to secure the vote for women, erase racial stereotyping, and end lynching.
She lectured across the country and abroad, and served as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, believing that the moral authority of women's organizations could be marshalled for social change. She was a founder of the NAACP, active in Republican politics, and sat on the Board of Education in the District of Columbia for eleven years.
As racial discrimination persisted however, she became increasingly militant and led younger African-Americans on picket lines and sit-ins in the nation's capitol as an octogenarian. Gracious, genteel, powerfully intelligent, and determined, Mary Church Terrell epitomized the southern woman in the early 20th century.
Lillian Smith (1897-1966). Smith's father was a successful businessman in Florida, but the depression destroyed his livelihood and the entire family moved to their summer home in Georgia, which they converted into Laurel Falls Camp for Girls.
Smith pieced together a college education between bouts of caring for aging parents, spent time in China missions work, and edited a successful magazine. Simultaneously, she continued to run the girls' camp.
Not until the success of her controversial novel Strange Fruit (1944) did she have any financial security. Its theme of interracial love plunged her into national prominence and led to the book's banning in Boston. She turned to writing full time, but additional novels were not as successful.
In 1949 she published Killers of the Dream, partly autobiographical memoir and partly sermonizing, she attacked segregation and white supremacy directly. She was one of several inspirations for a generation of civil rights activists.
In Now Is the Time (1955), Smith challenged Southerners to accept the Brown decision on desegregation by emphasizing the positive good that could come from racial tolerance and equal opportunity. She detested not only segregation, but also those southern moderates who urged that social change be undertaken slowly or only partially.
Though she had no patience with feminists, Smith believed that southern women's voices could not be heard. Today Smith is recognized as a graceful and prescient southern voice during hateful and contentious times, and also as a strong voice against gender conventions and limitations. She died of cancer in 1966.
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977). Hamer was born into a family of twenty children in rural Mississippi, living in a kind of poverty few can even imagine. She married young and continued sharecropping like her parents, living in a wooden shack without running water.
Hamer survived into her forties, when she came into contact with civil rights organizers. She persisted in attempts to register to vote, resulting in her being thrown off her job and out of her home. While participating in sit-ins in the whites-only bus station, she was jailed and sustained permanent injuries from the beatings she received.
Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and ran on their ticket for Congress. She went with the MFDP members to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to challenge the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation. In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus.
Whatever cause she worked in, Hamer did it for the poor and disenfranchised of society. When asked why she became an activist, she said, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." She died at the age of 59 -- that motto adorns her gravestone.
Rosalyn Carter (1927- ) Carter's idyllic middle-class Georgia childhood took a dramatic downward spiral at age 13 with her father's death. Working her way through high school and college, she married naval officer Jimmy Carter in 1946.
His naval career ended when he returned to Plains, Georgia, to take over the management of the family peanut farm. Together they raised four children. From the time her husband entered politics in 1962, Rosalyn remained a dedicated campaigner, organizer and confidante. Rosalyn Carter followed Eleanor Roosevelt's model of a First Lady with her own causes and agendas for social change, both at the state and national level. She particularly advocated for the treatment of mental illness.
In retirement, she has continued to advance programs to combat poverty and homelessness, particularly Habitat for Humanity, and to accompany her husband on world-wide peace missions. Both tough and soft-spoken, Carter remains a true southern lady.
Barbara Jordan (1936-1996). Jordan was born in Houston to a Baptist minister and his wife who did domestic work to make ends meet. After graduating magna cum laude from Texas Southern University, Jordan went to Boston University to study law.
She returned to Houston to practice law and in 1966, won a seat in the state Senate, the epitome of a white, male bastion. But her searing intellect and commanding rhetoric prompted them to elect her president pro tem during her last term.
Jordan was elected to Congress in 1972, the first African-American woman from the South to sit in the House. She served on the Judiciary Committee when they held the nationally-televised impeachment hearings on President Nixon. Jordan's deep voice, crisp diction, and razor-sharp logic made her a spell-binding keynote speaker at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.
She retired from Congress in 1978 and joined the faculty of the University of Texas, where she often taught her classes from a wheelchair as multiple sclerosis stole her strength. In a state where everything is larger than life, so was Barbara Jordan's impact on the South and on the nation.
Janis Joplin (1943-1970) Brash, boozy, bigger-than-life, Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur,Texas, almost in Louisiana, and she hated it. Completely disinterested in high school and her courses at the University of Texas, she preferred Austin's honky-tonks and the music scene.
Finally hitchhiking to San Francisco, she began playing with Big Brother and the Holding Company just as the "hippie scene" made San Francisco a mecca for young people and rock 'n roll. Her raucous stage presence and her throaty blues twists brought sudden fame.
Hits like "Ball and Chain" and "Me and Bobby McGee," albums selling millions of copies, magazine cover shots, and sold-out concerts never satisfied Joplin's drive for success. She reinvented identities for herself, including the infamous "Pearl" --southern women sometimes do.
The real Janis died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. Perhaps she doesn't qualify as a southern woman; she never covered the tough and gritty part of her personality with graciousness and gentility. But not everyone can.
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