[In the following essay, Scott documents the dissatisfaction of many Southern women with the restrictive roles assigned to them in the Old South.]

Open complaint about their lot was not the custom among southern ladies; yet their contented acceptance of the home as the “sphere to which God had appointed them” was sometimes more apparent than real. Most southern women would not have tried, or known how, to free themselves from the system which was supposed to be divinely ordained, but there is considerable evidence that many of them found the “sphere” very confining.

Women's expressions of unhappiness centered in two principal areas of life. One was their relationship to slaves. This complex web encompassed marriage, family life, and sexual mores as these were defined by the patriarchal doctrine. The second area of constant concern was education. Many women felt deeply deprived because their opportunities for learning were so limited.

For women, as for men, slaves were a troublesome property. It was not only that the administration of a large establishment was complex and demanding, or even that the mistress was expected to be a combination of supervisor, teacher, doctor, and minister to a large family of slaves. The greatest burden was psychological, of being day in and day out the arbiter of so many relationships, the person upon whom so many human beings depended. There was no privacy. “These women,” Mrs. Chesnut wrote, “… have less chance to live their own lives than if they were African missionaries. They have a swarm of blacks about them like children under their care … and they hate slavery worse than Mrs. Stowe does.”¹

Such conditions were bound to breed antagonism toward slaves. The expressions of it were common in diaries and letters, right through the Civil War. “I wish I could for once see a hearty negro woman who admitted herself to be over 40, one who was not ‘poorly, Thank God.!’ To be ‘poorly’ is their aim and object, as it ends in the house and spinning.”² “I cannot, nor will not, spend all these precious days of my life following after and watching Negroes. It is a terrible life!”³ “We contemplate removing to a free state. There we hope to be relieved of many unpleasant things, but particularly of the evils of slavery, for slaves are a continual source of trouble. … They are a source of more trouble to housewives than all other things, vexing them and causing much sin.”⁴ “I sometimes think I would not care if they all did go, they are so much trouble to me.”⁵ “When we change our residence, I cast my vote for a free state. … Negroes are nothing but a tax and annoyance to their owners.”⁶ “The negroes are a weight continually pulling us down! Will the time ever come for us to be free of them?”⁷ “Mr. Dunbar's Joe left Monday. He was a consummate hypocrite, in fact they all are.”⁸

Antagonism was only one part of the picture. There was also affection. It is possible to jettison nine-tenths of the sentiment about Negro mammies and still have substantial evidence of what was not, after all, a surprising phenomenon. Women who lived and worked together often formed bonds of friendship and mutual dependency across the color bar. “An affectionate friendship that was to last for more than sixty years,” one man wrote of his mother and a slave. “She was a member of the family,” wrote a Mississippi woman, and another, “She loved me devotedly and I was much attached to her.”⁹ A visiting Englishman commented upon the close relationship between the Calhoun ladies and their slaves.¹⁰

In the end antagonism and love led to the same conclusion: slavery was an evil. Most southern women who expressed themselves on the peculiar institution opposed slavery and were glad when it was ended. Mrs. Chesnut quoted her friend and confidante Isabella Martin as saying she never saw a true woman who was not an abolitionist, and Mrs. Chesnut herself claimed to have been one from the age of nineteen. The motives for antislavery feelings were mixed. Susan Dabney Smedes, describing her grandmother's abolitionism, was unable to say whether those sentiments were based on “sympathy with the colored race or with their owners.”¹¹ Whatever the motive, expressions of antislavery feelings ran through many personal documents.

“I must say that my mother never did like slavery and did not hesitate to say so. Her father once sent her a present of ten slaves which she sent back.”¹² “In some mysterious way I had drunk in with my mother's milk … a detestation of the curse of slavery laid upon our beautiful southern land.”¹³ “Had slavery lasted a few years longer, I have heard my mother say, it would have killed Julia, my head-woman, and me. Our burden of work and responsibility was simply staggering. … I was glad and thankful—on my own account when slavery ended, and I ceased to belong body and soul to my negroes. As my mother said, so said other southern mistresses.”¹⁴ “I often said to my husband that the freedom of the Negroes was a freedom to me.”¹⁵ “I do not see how I can live my life amid these people! … To be always among people whom I do not understand and whom I must guide, and teach and lead on like children. It frightens me.”¹⁶ “I wish we could get rid of all [slaves] at their value and leave this wretched country. I am more and more convinced that it is no place to rear a family of children.”¹⁷ “[I could not see] how the men I most honored and admired, my husband among the rest [,] could constantly justify it, and not only that but say that it was a blessing to the slave.”¹⁸ Years later a Louisiana woman wrote that she had been “subject at all times to the exactions and dictations of the black people who belonged to me, which now seems too extraordinary and incredible to relate.”¹⁹ “All my family on both sides … were slave owners … but I do not hesitate to say that slavery was a curse to the South.”²⁰ “I was born and raised in the South … as were all my relations before me. … Yet … my first recollection is of pity for the Negroes and desire to help them. … Always I felt the moral guilt of it, felt how impossible it must be for an owner of slaves to win his way into Heaven.”²¹ “Southern women are all, I believe, abolitionists.”²²

In the spring of 1855 Charles Eliot Norton visited friends in Charleston. Writing to James Russell Lowell on Good Friday of that year he reflected:

It is a very strange thing to hear men of character and cultivation … expressing their belief in open fallacies and monstrous principles [e.g., the defense of slavery]. … It seems to me sometimes as if only the women here read the New Testament, and as if the men regarded Christianity rather as a gentlemanly accomplishment than as anything more serious. It is very different with the women … but they are bewildered often, and their efforts are limited by weakness, inexperience, and opposition. Their eyes fill with tears when you talk with them about it.²³

A number of women saw a parallel between their own situation and that of slaves, a comparison made too often to be counted simply as rhetoric. “There is no slave, after all, like a wife,” Mary Chesnut wrote in a bitter moment. Or, “You know how women sell themselves and are sold in marriage, from queens downward. … Poor women, poor slaves.” And yet again, “All married women, all children and girls who live in their father's houses are slaves.”²⁴ “It was a saying that the mistress of a plantation was the most complete slave on it.”²⁵

Perhaps it was understanding growing from this identification with slaves which led so many southern women to be private abolitionists, and even a few to be public ones. Of the latter Sarah and Angelina Grimké were the most striking. Sarah was from childhood rebellious against the lot of southern women and fought throughout her adult life for the emancipation of women and slaves. Angelina also worked to free the slaves, married a leading abolitionist, and in her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South addressed herself to the parallels between the experiences of women and of slaves.²⁶

Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford was another southern woman who took her discontent with slavery to the world. A Virginian of bluest blood and a busy housewife with six children, she spent her spare time and money, as well as all the money she could charm from her friends, buying slaves to be sent to freedom in Liberia. Although the colonization movement was regarded by radical abolitionists as a refuge for people unwilling to face the true dimensions of the slavery question, Mrs. Blackford's diagnosis of the ills of slavery was radical enough:

Think what it is to be a Slave!!! To be treated not as a man but as a personal chattel, a thing that may be bought and sold, to have no right to the fruits of your own labour, no right to your own wife and children, liable at any moment to be separated [sic] at the arbitrary will of another from all that is dearest to you on earth, & whom it is your duty to love & cherish. Deprived by the law of learning to read the Bible, compelled to know that the purity of your wife and daughters is exposed without protection of law to the assault of a brutal white man! Think of this, and all the nameless horrors that are concentrated in that one word Slavery.²⁷

The evils of slavery tended to merge with the grievances, even the repressed grievances, of southern women. The slave was deprived of a secure family life, had to obey his master, and in some states was denied by law the right to learn. For women, family life had its quota of pain, much of it related to slavery, and they, too, were supposed to take orders from men and to learn only so much as would not unfit them for their appropriate role in the patriarchy.

The virtues of this domestic system, which men praised so highly, were not always clear to their subordinates in the hierarchy. “Under slavery we live surrounded by prostitutes,” wrote Mary Chesnut; “like patriarchs of old, our men live in one house with their wives and concubines. … Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own.” This theme runs through her diary:

A magnate who runs a hideous black harem with its consequences under the same roof with his lovely white wife, and his beautiful accomplished daughters … poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the laws have given him. From the height of his awful majesty, he scolds and thunders at them, as if he never did wrong in his life.²⁸

Few southern women appreciated the argument of a South Carolina gentleman who thought the availability of slave women avoided the horrors of prostitution. He pointed out that men could satisfy their sexual needs while increasing their slave property.²⁹ The bitterness of southern women on this subject came out again and again. One spoke of “violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries,” and suggested that the four years of bloody war was a fit penance for so many sins.³⁰ “I saw slavery in its bearing on my sex,” wrote another. “I saw that it teemed with injustice and shame to all womankind and I hated it.”³¹

There was an undercurrent of concern about venereal disease. The fiction women wrote and read was full of mysteriously disillusioned brides and dissolute men. A North Carolina student in the 1840s could remark without comment that the university was “never free from clap.” Conversely, the exaggerated praise heaped upon “pure” men reflected something more than admiration of good character. It was an index to the anxiety of women endangered by their husbands. Primitive medical knowledge offered little protection to the wives of men whose visits to the slave quarters left them diseased.

Miscegenation was only one grievance. Women felt deeply aggrieved by the prevailing double standard. The conventions of nineteenth-century discourse make precise evidence difficult to come by, but veiled comments suggest that many women found the social standards governing sexual life hard to accept. The accepted belief was that only men and depraved women were sexual creatures and that pure women were incapable of erotic feeling. The inadequacy of this description is made apparent in fiction, biography, personal documents, and court records.

The syrupy descriptions of romantic love nearly always carried erotic overtones, and the constant emphasis upon woman's “magic spell,” indicated something about the unconscious preoccupations of the society. A Methodist minister thought it self-evident that puberty was the period when “the female, pressed by a new want … should renounce that inexperience in love which was becoming in tranquil youth,”³² should, in other words, begin to think of marriage. “The villain … had at length found the unguarded moment in which a woman can deny nothing to the man she loves,” said one of Beverly Tucker's characters.³³ A college boy expressing horror at the rumor of Daniel Webster's marital infidelities also noted (possibly from his own observation but more likely from student gossip) that “women of late have become unfaithful to their husbands. Some women I don't believe can be satisfied.” Mrs. Chesnut recorded premarital as well as extramarital sex among her friends and acquaintances and the historian of antebellum North Carolina found many respected citizens asking the legislature to legitimize their bastard children.³⁴ Angelina Grimké, whose ideas on the subject began to be formed in Charleston, in a letter to her fiancé threw light on the sexual scene:

I have been tempted to think marriage was sinful, because of what appeared to me almost invariably to prompt and lead to it. Instead of the higher, nobler sentiments being first aroused, and leading on the lower passions captive to their will, the latter seemed to be lords over the former. Well I am convinced that men in general, the vast majority, believe most seriously that women were made to gratify their animal appetites.³⁵

The evidence does not bear out the notion that all the good women, all the respectable wives, totally suppressed their sexuality, though the values of their society certainly encouraged them to do so. It suggests instead a bitterness against the freedom which men arrogated to themselves and the restrictions they laid upon women. Mrs. Chesnut quoted one Charleston matron:

Now I assert that the theory upon which modern society is based is all wrong. A man is supposed to confide his honor to his wife. If she misbehaves herself, his honor is tarnished. But how can a man be disgraced by another person's doing what, if he did it himself … he would not be hurt at all in public estimation?³⁶

A Georgia woman commented upon a friend who had left her husband when she discovered him to be supporting a mistress and a second family. She approved the woman's courage, adding, “I do think she would have been doing an injustice to herself to remain with him—yet how often this is done—How often let Martyr women testify!” She went on to discuss another case in which a married woman had run away with another man, saying that the husband would be considered quite justified if he refused to take her back, while the other man's wife would of course be expected to receive her wayward spouse without comment. “Custom does indeed sanction many a wrong. But I mount my hobby horse when I converse on the subject of woman and her wrongs.”³⁷

Some discreet Charleston ladies appeared to manage their affairs without disgrace, but the theory was that one misstep ruined a woman forever. The diary of a well-educated and intelligent New Orleans concubine made it clear that while she was seeking counsel from a minister and hoping for God's forgiveness, she accepted without question the fact that the local community would not forgive her.³⁸ In a popular novel a beautiful and capable “good” girl put herself beyond the pale in one half-hour, in her own eyes as well as those of a would-be suitor.³⁹

There were still other reasons, besides miscegenation and the double standard, for a good deal of well-concealed misery in marriage. Oscar Handlin has suggested that the increase in life expectancy in the nineteenth century, preceding as it did the widespread understanding of contraception, increased the strain on domestic tranquility.⁴⁰ Earlier, in the eighteenth century, the high mortality rate made it possible for some persons to marry three or four times. If one marriage was unsuccessful, the next might be better. By the 1830s, however, when the glorification of family life and domestic joy was at its peak, declining death rates increased the likelihood of having to live a whole lifetime with the same mate.

Even in happy marriages, patriarchal assumptions could cause some chafing. Mary Chesnut admired her husband and enjoyed his company, yet her comments on men in general and James Chesnut in particular were frequently acerb: “What a blessed humbug domestic felicity is, eh? … But he is master of the house. To hear is to obey. … all the comfort of my life depends upon his being in a good humor. … Does a man ever speak to his wife and children except to find fault. … It is only in books that people fall in love with their wives.” Many diaries and letters speak openly of bitter unhappiness, and one woman prayed to be able to control her “roving fancy.”⁴¹

Such evidence of domestic discontent is reinforced by the observations of southern ministers. A North Carolina Quaker named Thomas Arnett, for example, published a biting critique of family life as it had come under his view. Parents, he said, were capricious in their discipline and preoccupied with false values. John Bayley, a Virginia Methodist, devoted a whole book to the varieties of marital unhappiness he saw around him, and urged both men and women to become more reflective about this vital institution. The practical advice he offered suggests what he had observed: Wives should be neat and clean. (“A minister who travels extensively sees how many wives become disgracefully negligent in a short time. When I have visited some places, and have looked at the wife and children I have soon understood why the husband was seldom at home in his leisure hours.”) It was very important to take care of health. (“Every third woman with whom we meet is an invalid.”) Husbands should honor their wives, tend the flame of affection, and defeat the whole idea of the “rights of women” by keeping their wives happy.⁴²

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet was also a minister—but only incidentally. He was successively president of three colleges, a lawyer of some repute, and best known to posterity as the author of Georgia Scenes, which he offered to the public in 1835 as a reasonably accurate description of life in middle Georgia. One of his stories, “A Charming Creature,” offers much the same criticism of marriage, albeit in fictional form. The “charming creature” was a beautiful girl, daughter of a successful businessman in a Georgia town, who had been sent to school in Philadelphia to polish her feminine arts. So successful was she in this endeavor that, when she came home, a hardworking, intelligent young lawyer was completely taken in by her flirtatious ways. After amusing herself for a while, as cat with mouse, she lured him to the altar. Naturally her coquettish habits, so well cultivated, did not disappear after marriage, and her total lack of domestic training led to miserable housekeeping and unbearable extravagance. Her disillusioned husband was driven to drink and an early death. Longstreet's young woman had been raised to believe that the most important thing in her life was her “magic spell”—the ability to entice a man into marriage—but there her education ended. The consequences were disastrous.

If, as the evidence suggests, marriages so eagerly sought were not always satisfactory afterward; if family life for all its potential joys was shadowed by the deaths of children and constant pregnancy; if the lord and master, in close daily encounter, turned out not to be the superior being of the myth; if his sexual freedom was in marked contrast to the perfect chastity of thought and deed demanded of his wife, it was no wonder that some women wondered why life had to be so one-sided. One young woman lamented in her diary: “Oh! the disadvantages we labor under, in not possessing the agreeable independence with the men; tis shameful that all the superiority, authority and freedom in all things should by partial Nature be thrown into their scale.”⁴³ Another, very happily married, occasionally expressed a sense of injustice: “… what a drag it is sometimes on a woman to ‘lug about’ the ladder upon which man plants his foot and ascends to the intellectual heaven of peace in ignorance of the machinery which feeds his daily life.”⁴⁴ The wife of a distinguished Louisiana judge who would invent a wholly new pattern of life for herself after the war, found housewifely chores a bore and longed for an opportunity to develop her literary and political interests. Guilt-ridden, she looked for religious consolation and made stern resolutions to do better. “I … am determined to be more contented … in the future.”⁴⁵

An anonymous author, probably female, writing in the Southern Ladies Companion in 1849 cried out against the paradox of demanding perfection from an inferior being.

Much is always expected of her, in all the spheres of life where she is found. And particularly as a matron, where the functions of wife, mother and mistress are all blended, she is expected to perform duties so complicated and important in character, and so far-reaching in their ultimate consequences, as would require all the tact of the diplomatist, the wisdom of the sage, and the graces of the perfect Christian. In a word, she is expected to be a living encyclopedia of human endowments and perfections. …

And yet these very sticklers for perfection … on woman's part, are not infrequently found to hold surprising opinions as to her natural inferiority to the other sex. … A singular phenomenon this, for which a satisfactory explanation would be thankfully received.⁴⁶

There followed an impassioned statement of the injustice of the one-sided emphasis upon education for men, the denial to women of any right to mental cultivation or even of preparation for what all agreed were womanly responsibilities. “The wonder is,” said the author caustically, “that women generally make out as well as they do in after life.” The article was signed at Charleston.

In view of the definition of woman's role in the South, it is understandable that a southern woman should have written the earliest systematic expression in America of the whole set of ideas constituting the ideology of “woman's rights.” Sarah Grimké was born in Charleston in 1792, one of the numerous progeny of a distinguished judge. As a young girl she had expressed the desire to study law. There is no record of her father's response, but he is said to have remarked that if she had been a man she would have become a great jurist. Whether the story is true hardly matters. It sums up the attitude which led Judge Grimké's daughter, and many other able women, to revolt against the social norms.

Early in life Sarah Grimké developed an intense concern about the institution of slavery. In 1821 she struck out on her own for Philadelphia, where she worked with the Friends and took to the platform to denounce slaveholding. When her public speaking was criticized as “unwomanly” she was moved to write Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Published in 1837, these letters constitute a lucid critique of the whole nineteenth-century image of woman, and of the effect it had upon the lives of women—particularly upon women's education, upon what women were led by custom to expect and upon their legal status, and upon women's own choices of the way they spent that most precious commodity, time. No part of the image escaped her devastating pen. She urged women to adopt a new and different ideal of womanhood.

She went at once to what she saw as the heart of the problem: women were “taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue of distinction.” From this basic premise a whole train of evils followed. Since men took the initiative in proposing marriage, it was only natural for women to develop those aspects of their personalities they believed to be attractive to men and to suppress the others. Their intellectual development suffered, for men were known to shun intellectual women. Because men demanded it, women had come to regard themselves as no more than “pretty toys” or “mere instruments of pleasure,” rather than as whole human beings with souls to be saved and work to do in the world. The premise that marriage was woman's central goal led to the neglect of her education, which meant not only that women failed to develop fully but that children were shortchanged in their education, which in the early years came from their mothers.

Sarah Grimké did not limit her analysis to the effect of the chivalric ideal and the assumption of female inferiority upon her own social class. She was one of the first American social critics to recognize that as women were drawn into employment away from home they were paid much less than their male counterparts and that their belief in their own inferiority, combined with a very poor bargaining position, diminished their capacity to fight back. In every class women's lack of self-respect led to still other consequences:

… women being educated, from earliest childhood, to regard themselves as inferior creatures, have not that self-respect which conscious equality would engender, and hence when their virtue is assailed, they yield to temptation with facility, under the idea that it rather exalts than debases them to be connected with a superior being.⁴⁷

She was concerned, too, about slave women whose virtue, she argued, was wholly at the mercy of “irresponsible tyrants.”

She tried to show that men would gain by granting the equality of women, since they would find educated women intelligent companions, though she was convinced that, as a rule, men were not anxious to see women improve. She argued that it was ruinous to men and women alike for women to be parasites, and that if women felt the responsibility to support themselves it would add “strength and dignity to their characters.” She discussed the question of woman's innate capacity, the problems of dress, of legal disability, and of the relationships of husbands and wives as she had observed them. She also undertook to examine and refute Saint Paul's dictum that women should be silent in the churches.⁴⁸

Sarah Grimké's views on slavery were not unusual, though she and her sister Angelina were among the few open southern abolitionists. As a theorist of male-female relationships, however, she stood alone among southern women for two generations. Sarah Grimké thought she had been badly educated: “… the powers of my mind have never been allowed expansion; in childhood they were repressed by the false idea that a girl need not have the education I coveted.”⁴⁹

Whatever a better education might have done for her, her Letters was based on wide reading and was well reasoned and well written. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, she was a very intelligent woman, intelligent enough to know that she was not an inferior being. Yet intelligence alone does not account for the self-confidence which permitted her to break away from family and home, to encourage her sister to do likewise, and to become a dangerous radical even by northern standards. Something in the Grimkés' early experience had given them an independence of mind uncommon among nineteenth-century women. Their mother, an aristocratic Charleston lady, while deploring the course her daughters had taken, never abandoned them and continued to write affectionate letters as long as she lived.⁵⁰

About the time that Sarah Grimké, from her refuge in the North was attacking the assumptions upon which southern society based its image of woman, one of the South's leading intellectuals was taking issue with these assumptions from another direction. Thomas R. Dew was a professor at William and Mary College; in 1836 he would be its president. He taught an unusual political science course based less on didactic precepts of government than on a study of comparative institutions. He had also applied his fine mind to developing a thoroughgoing justification of slavery. In 1835 he published three articles entitled “The Characteristic Differences between the Sexes.”⁵¹ Like his lectures on history and government, his articles were based on comparative analysis. Hastily read, they might be taken for an intolerably long statement of the classic southern position on women. On closer analysis, however, it is clear that Dew did much more than restate what everyone agreed on.

Dew questioned the assumption that the characteristics which the image demanded were God-given. He questioned whether women were by nature emotional, naturally inferior and subject to men. He pointed out that education in sex roles began at so early an age that it was impossible to determine “whether their moral and intellectual differences are due wholly to education or partly to nature.” He noted also that his analysis applied to everyone of either sex and not to individuals.

… for the individual female will frequently be found to have all the masculine traits of character more perfectly developed than the individual man. Few men, for example, can be compared to an Edgeworth or De Stael in point of intellect—and few have shown more persevering courage and masculine heroism, than Queen Margaret of England or Joan d'Arc of France.

Echoing Adam Smith on the influence of occupation on personality, he pointed out that the way women spent their time accounted for much that was considered typically “feminine” in their behavior. The only characteristics of women which he considered to have been given by nature were physical weakness and the capacity for maternity. Both shaped women's typical behavior. Lacking the physical prowess to protect themselves or to get what they wanted in the world, they had no recourse save their “magic spell”—hence it was that “grace, modesty and loveliness” had come to be instruments of power. The cultivation of these qualities, which Sarah Grimké found so degrading and the practical results of which Longstreet thought disastrous, Professor Dew found altogether charming. But like Miss Grimké, he thought physical beauty inadequate unless combined with beauty of mind.

Motherhood was obviously a natural function, and he did not fail to note its effect on women's character. Babies took so much time, he suggested, that if a woman were ambitious in law or politics or any profession, she would soon find herself outdistanced by men who were not tied to the nursery and the sickroom. Since few women in Dew's tidewater Virginia circles aspired to law or politics, he was obviously responding to currents from outside. He admitted to having read Mary Wollstonecraft.

Like Sarah Grimké he thought that the emphasis on marriage had shaped the prevailing female character. Since men were expected to do the wooing, they were free to express romantic interests or sexual attraction. Women, who had to wait to be asked, learned early to keep their feelings under cover, sometimes with bad results. A woman who was “frequently required to suppress the most violent feelings; to put a curb on her most ardent desires … can suffer much, she can suffer long, in silence without complaint.” Feelings which must thus be suppressed, he suggested, might be destroyed.

Dew discussed the opportunities provided by southern culture for men to develop their full potential and observed that women, by contrast, were forced into an unnatural amiability: “The desire to please is undoubtedly the ruling passion of the female heart. … Women are precisely what men make them, all over the world.” And, he added, “Addison says that had women determined their own point of honor, it is probable that wit or good nature would have carried it against chastity, but our sex have preferred the latter, and woman has conformed to the decision.”

In short, Dew liked sweet, gentle, beautiful, shy, modest, domestic women but was under no illusion that God had made them that way. On the contrary, such women were products of a particular culture, a particular kind of conditioning—above all, they followed a particular pattern of male expectation. The image had, to a point, the power to shape reality. It is not clear whether Dew was fully aware of the implications of asking many of the central questions toward which women themselves were groping.

An increasing number of southern men, many of them ministers or college presidents, were beginning to raise some of the same points and some of them went considerably beyond Dew. These men, too, attacked the assumption of female inferiority—at least intellectual inferiority—and advocated a more serious and thorough education for women. Their central themes had appeared at least as early as the eighteenth century when there had been a flurry of concern for educating women “as companions not as playthings for men.” The idea had never wholly disappeared from the didactic literature.⁵² In practice, however, when marriage at fifteen or sixteen was common, the time allocated for instruction was short; and while numerous female seminaries and academies were scattered about the South, not much could be said for the rigors of their curriculums or the qualifications of the teachers.

“I entered at fifteen years and six months and graduated at sharp seventeen,” Rebecca Felton remembered. “I took the entire course, also lessons on the piano and guitar.”⁵³ Mrs. Felton and a good many others had the stamina to carry on a lifelong program of self-education. But on the whole, such a hop, step, and jump over a supposedly academic course could not produce lasting effects.

By the 1830s the inadequacy of women's education was a favorite topic for public speakers. The same analysis was repeatedly offered. Dressing their central point in flowery language, a good many men said that women who knew nothing but home skills were often dull and trying wives, not efficient even in dealing with their domestic responsibilities. Since there were no hetaerae in the South's particular version of Greek civilization, a man who wanted to talk to an intelligent woman was confined to his own or someone else's wife.⁵⁴ It was desirable, therefore, that wives have something more on their minds than the best recipe for scuppernong wine or the most effective treatment for measles.

A typical exhortation was delivered by the Reverend Mr. W. T. Hamilton of Mobile, speaking at the annual examination of a female seminary in Marion, Alabama, in 1845. He began with a vigorous plea for “intellectual culture” for women; the mere fact of a narrower sphere of activity, he argued, did not mean that women's minds were less capable of cultivation than those of men and that the only basis for durable respect between the sexes was a cultivated mind. The man who married a well-educated woman was, in Hamilton's view, “blessed beyond ordinary mortals.” He denied that intellectual development threatened good housekeeping; it might on the contrary have a beneficial effect. Above all, educated women were more pleasant to have around.⁵⁵ An elegant Charleston gentleman, William Porcher Miles, offered much the same argument to the young ladies of the Yorkville Female College, bolstering his case with examples of learned ladies from history.⁵⁶

In 1847 the Reverend William Hooper, president of Wake Forest College, told another female seminary that women needed a solid academic program, with some attention to physical education. In the background one faintly discerns husbands afflicted by wives with constant headaches. He touched on what may have been the sorest point of all. Shame on man, he said, with all his opportunities for education if he could not keep up with an educated woman. “Woman's rivalry, instead of alarming his jealousy, ought only to let him know the necessity of continued progress, lest she overtake or outstrip him.”⁵⁷

Turning the ancient argument about woman's beneficent influence upon men in a new direction, Hooper asserted: “Give us girls as can understand and delight in such a work as Paradise Lost, more than in trashy novels or the trashy, insipid chat of town gossip, and I will soon show you a new race of men, ambitious to merit and to win the noble hearts of such a race of women.”⁵⁸ And, throwing light upon the domestic scene: “Shall the beautiful half of creation be just like a collection of pictures and statues, pleasing the eye but having no graces of mind to match these external graces … [and] as soon as she opens her mouth shall enchantment vanish by the utterance of coarse and vulgar ideas, and of low, ungrammatical language?”⁵⁹

Urging fathers to worry less about saving money for a dowry and more about spending it wisely to educate their daughters, Hooper pointed out that with the inevitable fading of youth and beauty a woman needed other resources. And since women were so often the center of a family's religious life, religion itself was denigrated when they were ignorant. Finally, husbands could not respect ignorant wives; and a mother who did not have the respect of the father would be looked down on by her children.

Repeated variations on this argument appeared, in periodicals, journals, speeches, and sermons. In their own way, in short, respected southern gentlemen echoed Sarah Grimké's demand for female education. But if they denied the intellectual inferiority of women, they upheld most of the other elements of the mythical southern lady. None of them suggested any real expansion in woman's “sphere.” Their point was that an educated woman could inhabit the sphere more gracefully and conduct her female responsibilities more effectively.⁶⁰

All the male arguments for improving female education were founded upon two or three premises: that women had undeveloped intellectual capacities, that educated women made better wives and better mothers (and hence a better society), and that educated women were better companions. These gentlemen did not consider the possible consequences of their advice. Southern men who assented to laws forbidding slaves to be taught to read and write should have understood that it was risky to educate anyone whom they wished to keep in a degree of subjection. If enough women had an opportunity for the significant intellectual development they were advocating, would they then be satisfied to remain in the sphere into which men and society cast them?

An interesting example of what might happen occurred in Chapel Hill. Two members of the University of North Carolina faculty, Elisha Mitchell and James Phillips, decided in the 1840s to give their daughters an education equal to that of the young men in the college. The Mitchell girls and Cornelia Phillips were tutored by their fathers, attended college classes, and were encouraged to read and study systematically. All three were bright, and at least one undergraduate thought Cornelia Phillips “the smartest girl I know” and added that if only she had had money he would certainly have courted her!⁶¹

What was the result? Hope Summerell Chamberlain, Ellen Mitchell's daughter, thought her mother had been made forever discontented with the ordinary round of women's activity.

Restless my mother was, with active mind and ever-skillful hands. The sense of restraint and inefficacy, the desire to use some of her abundant vitality beyond the bounds of her environment, made her thoughts widely wandering. …

Too much mental activity in a woman is still considered a nuisance. In those old days, learning might still be pardoned in a man, but it was a monstrous excrecence [sic] upon a womanly personality. Accordingly, neither then or later did Mother talk much of her mental excursions.⁶²

As for Cornelia Phillips, the effects of her unusual education reached into the twentieth century, as will presently appear. For the moment it is necessary only to observe an entry in her diary, made shortly after the Civil War:

But I feel sometimes such an impatience of my life and its narrow lot as I can scarcely describe. I want to go and see something better than I have ever known. … I want to go, to take wings and fly and leave these sordid occupations. …

I think sometimes it is cruel to cultivate tastes that are never to be gratified in this world.⁶³

For many women, the desire for education beyond that accorded them was a source of discontent. Rarely doubting their own mental capacities, they complained bitterly about the absence of educational opportunities. A fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana, for example:

I wish to go to studying again for I feel more than ever before my great ignorance in all that pertains to knowledge. … I know nothing of the sciences and no language except my own and a little of the Latin, and then there are accomplishments.⁶⁴

Two years later the same girl recorded in one month's diary entries that she was reading Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Humboldt's Cosmos, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

A young matron in eastern Georgia, mother of several children, noted in her Journal in 1857:

I have been reading Macaulay's Essays—find them both entertaining and instructive, and wish that I had history at my tongue's end as he has—I look back at the past ten years of my life with much regret, for I feel that I have not devoted this time to intellectual culture as I should have. My mind has I fear shrunk instead of expanding, but I am going to do better for myself. I must and will devote more time to study. Oh that I could lend some aid to lift the cloud which obscures our Southern intellectual sky.⁶⁵

Elsewhere in Georgia a younger and more frivolous lady shared some of the same feelings and announced her resolution to resume the study of Latin under the inspiration of Augusta Evans's St. Elmo.⁶⁶ A Louisiana girl was startled into a new view by a long talk with a visiting Confederate colonel, who told her that she, too, could reason and that the ignorance she deplored in herself was not inevitable.

And when I … looked in my own heart and saw my shocking ignorance and pitiful inferiority so painfully evident to my own eyes I actually cried. Why was I denied the education that would enable me to be the equal of such a man?⁶⁷

In 1859 a North Carolina woman was emboldened to raise her voice in public—or, rather, to raise someone else's voice, since, being female, she was not permitted to read her own paper to the North Carolina Education Association. Beginning with a lament for “this long neglected topic” and apparently unaware of the sympathy she might have found among some men in her region, Delia W. Jones asserted that

Among our Lords and Masters, no champion can be found ready to fight the battles of ambitious womanhood against folly and ignorance … [hence] ourselves should occasionally venture to take up the gauntlet, and in defiance of custom, tell the world that in addition to our known and confessed ability to talk, we would also like to think, and be taught how to direct thought so as to talk more wisely.⁶⁸

As many of these quotations suggest, reading was one of the ways in which women could compensate for their limited intellectual opportunities. Many women read constantly, and while the outcry against novel-reading suggests that much of their reading was for escape and amusement, they also devoted a great deal of time to serious, sometimes naive, efforts to remedy by self-education the deficiencies of formal instruction. Mill's Political Economy, Dickens's novels, Madame de Staël's Corinne, Bulwer's novels, Plutarch, Boswell, Tennyson, Milton, Huxley, Darwin, were only a few of the authors and titles which sprinkled diary pages. A careful study of one plantation lady's reading habits showed her to be familiar with a wide range of ancient and modern literature, especially Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. During the Civil War she became a student of military strategy. There is nothing in her life or background to suggest that she was unique.⁶⁹

Beyond reading there was writing. Helen Papashvily makes an amusing and persuasive case for the sentimental novel as the weapon with which nineteenth-century women took their revenge upon men.⁷⁰ A good number of the novels she discusses were written by southern women. At least two of these, Caroline Lee Hentz and Augusta Evans Wilson, were clear examples of women of more than ordinary talent and energy who found the role of the southern lady restrictive. Mrs. Hentz joined her husband in schoolteaching but found adolescent girls a trial, and in her novels she revealed a good deal of her dissatisfaction with a woman's life.⁷¹ Augusta Evans became not only a best-selling author but a kind of folk heroine in Mobile, where, having married a man old enough to be her father, she presided over a stately mansion. Literary success released her from many of the restrictions customarily laid upon her sex, but she was vehemently opposed to such an escape for other women.

God, the maker, tenderly anchored womanhood in the peaceful blessed haven of home; and if man is ever insane enough to mar the divine economy by setting women afloat on the turbulent roaring sea of politics, they will speedily become pitiable wrecks. … Surely utter ignorance is infinitely preferable to erudite unwomanliness.⁷²

Mrs. Wilson, who wrote long letters of advice to Congressman J. L. M. Curry and studied history, languages, and philosophy, was not the last woman to achieve an enviable emancipation herself while denying that it was appropriate for others. She had a low opinion of her contemporaries. “Southern women are often pleasant and graceful,” she wrote in a letter to Curry, but their “information is painfully scanty, their judgement defective, their reasoning faculties dwarfed, their aspirations weak and frivolous.”⁷³

If deep-seated resentment against the narrowness of educational opportunity and the assumption of intellectual inferiority occasionally broke into the open, resentment against economic dependency was more likely to be kept hidden in the recesses of private diaries. Mrs. Chesnut noted that she had inherited her share of her father's estate soon after her marriage and that it went for debts her husband had already contracted.

That being the case, why feel like a beggar, utterly humiliated and degraded when I am forced to say I need money? I cannot tell, but I do; and the worst of it is, this thing grows worse as one grows older. Money ought not to be asked for, or given to a man's wife as a gift. Something must be due her, and that she should have, and no growling and grumbling nor warnings against waste and extravagance, nor hints as to the need of economy, nor amazement that the last supply has given out already. What a proud woman suffers under all this, who can tell?⁷⁴

“I told him I thought he was extravagant to hire a gardener,” wrote a Mississippi woman, “and he seemed hurt—well he might be, for I have no right to say a word, he earns the money. … I make nothing and have no right to anything but to receive thankfully what is given me.”⁷⁵ Other women tried various devices for earning a little money for themselves, though even that, under the law, belonged to their husbands. Selling surplus garden products, giving music lessons, and even writing poems for newspapers were not uncommon.

By the eve of the Civil War a psychological Geiger counter would have detected growing discontent with woman's assigned role.⁷⁶ Outside influences contributed to the increasing restiveness of southern women. The 1850s were for the whole United States a decade of economic development, population growth, and considerable population movement. It was also a decade of great political tension and mounting paranoia on the subject of slavery, a period of instability which increased anxiety and fear for the future. Even some well-protected southern women heard the reverberations which followed the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and its “Declaration of Sentiments.” Where all this would have led in the absence of a war no one can guess. But the war came and as wars do, it speeded social change and opened Pandora's box.

Notes

1. Diary from Dixie, p. 163.

2. Catherine Edmonston, “Diary of Looking Glass Plantation,” December 1860.

3. Laura Beecher Comer Diary, 5 January 1862, SHC UNC.

4. Fannie Moore Webb Bumpas Diary, 15 August 1843, SHC UNC.

5. Catherine Barbara Broun Diary, 1 January 1864, SHC UNC.

6. Diary of Mrs. Isaac Hilliard, 16 and 19 June 1850, Dept. of Archives, LSU.

7. Letitia M. Burwell, Girl's Life, p. 61.

8. Anonymous Diary, 30 July 1866, MS Dept., Duke.

9. L. Minor Blackford, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory [: the Story of a Virginia lady, Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford, 1802-1896, who taught her sons to hate slavery and to love the Union. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954], p. 48; Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, pp. 47-48; V. V. Clayton, White and Black under the Old Regime [Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970], p. 127.

10. G. W. Featherstonhaugh, A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor (London, 1847), quoted in K. Jones, Plantation South [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1957], p. 127.

11. Memorials, p. 82. Diary from Dixie, passim. The theme of women as abolitionists runs through the diary.

12. Reminiscences of E. V. J. Semple, SHC UNC, p. 18.

13. Constance Cary Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay (London: Smith, Elder, 1912), p. 42.

14. Myrta L. Avary, Dixie after the War (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), pp. 179-81.

15. V. V. Clayton, White and Black, p. 155.

16. Elizabeth Allston Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, p. 66.

17. Anna Matilda King to Thomas Butler King, December 1844, SHC UNC.

18. Cornelia McDonald, A Diary with Reminiscences of the War and Refugee Life in the Shenandoah Valley (Nashville: Cullom & Ghertner, 1935), pp. 11-12.

19. Caroline Merrick, Old Times in Dixie Land (New York: Grafton Press, 1901), pp. 17-18.

20. Rebecca Latimer Felton, The Subjection and Enfranchisement of Women, pamphlet, MS Dept., University of Georgia.

21. Brockenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, pp. 6-8.

22. E. G. C. Thomas Diary, 2 January, 1859, MS Dept., Duke.

23. Sara Norton and Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, with Biographical Comment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 1: 126-27. I am indebted to Mr. Ralph Luker for calling this letter to my attention.

24. Diary from Dixie, pp. 49 and 486.

25. Smedes, Memorials, p. 179.

26. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), pp. 21 ff. A more detailed discussion of Sarah Grimké in a different context appears on pp. 61-63 below.

27. Blackford, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, p. 47.

28. Diary from Dixie, pp. 21-22.

29. Chancellor Harper, “Memoir on Slavery,” Southern Literary Journal, February 1838, p. 1.

30. Rebecca Latimer Felton, Country Life in Georgia, in the Days of My Youth, p. 79.

31. Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, A Southern Woman's Wartime Reminiscences (privately printed, 1905), p. 14.

32. John C. Bayley, Marriage As It Is and Should Be, p. 14.

33. George Balcombe [by Beverley Tucker. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836], 1: 63.

34. John L. Sanders, ed., “Diary of Ruffin Wirt Tomlinson,” North Carolina Historical Review 30 (January-April 1953): 243; Guion Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937], pp. 209-10.

35. Gilbert Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké 1822-1844 (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 2: 587.

36. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, p. 224.

37. E. G. C. Thomas Diary, 1858.

38. Diary of Madeline Selina Edwards, SHC UNC. Ironically, when she was deserted by her lover and forced to earn money she tried writing articles for magazines on “domestic happiness.”

39. Tucker, George Balcombe, 1: 53-60.

40. Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), p. 148. The whole chapter “The Horrors” is relevant here. Of course, measuring happiness, much less comparing it from one person or period to another, is something no historian has yet found a way to do. Hence the comparative statements sometimes made about the greater degree of happiness in marriage at one period or another are entirely intuitive. It seems likely that the supposedly “disintegrating” family of the twentieth century may represent, on balance, a larger number of comfortable relationships than did the “stable” family of the early nineteenth century, though expectations regarding marriage may have differed from present-day ones. The only thing that can be said with a degree of certainty is that when women had few alternatives to marriage a great deal of discontent was suppressed. See chapter 9 below for Ernest Groves guess about the degree of repression of unhappiness in the nineteenth century.

41. Diary from Dixie; and also see, for example, Diary of Laura Beecher Comer, SHC UNC; Diary of E. G. C. Thomas, MS Dept., Duke; Diary of Mrs. Isaac Hilliard, Department of Archives, LSU; Mrs. M. E. Jones to Mrs. Mary Burwell, 14 March 1836, Burwell Papers, MS Dept., Duke; Sarah Morgan Diary, MS Dept., Duke; Martha Foster Crawford Diary, October 1849, MS Dept., Duke; Diary of Lucilla McCorkle, January 1852, SHC UNC.

42. Marriage As It Is, pp. 113-19.

43. Elizabeth Ruffin, undated diary, SHC UNC.

44. Edmonston, “Diary of Looking Glass Plantation,” 2 May 1862.

45. Caroline Merrick to “my dear friend,” 18 September 1855 and 27 December 1858, Dept. of Archives, LSU.

46. Southern Ladies Companion, November 1849, p. 169.

47. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (Boston: I. Knapp, 1838), p. 51.

48. Ibid., pp. 47-55.

49. S. Grimké to Harriot Hunt, 31 December 1852, Weld Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

50. See Lerner, The Grimké Sisters, and Barnes and Dumond, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld et al.

51. Southern Literary Messenger 1 (1835): 493-512, 621-23, 672-91.

52. See F. … L. … Esquire, The Female Friend; or The Duties of Christian Virgins (Baltimore: H. S. Keatinge, 1809); James M. Garnett, Seven Lectures on Female Education, 2d ed. (Richmond: T. W. White, 1824.)

53. Country Life in Georgia, p. 72.

54. Mrs. Chesnut's diary provides material for reflection on this point. Evidently many of the movers and shakers of the Confederacy did enjoy intelligent female companionship, and Mrs. Chesnut was therefore in great demand. She had learned to handle the situation so expertly that her constant association with senators, members of Congress and the cabinet, and military leaders only occasionally led to a domestic uproar.

55. Rev. W. T. Hamilton, A Plea for the Liberal Education of Women, Delivered at the annual examination of the female seminary under the direction of Rev. S. R. Wright at Marion, Alabama (New York, 1845), pamphlet in Duke University library.

56. William Porcher Miles, How to Educate Our Girls, delivered to the young ladies of Yorkville, S. C. Female College (n.d.), pamphlet in Duke University library. Miles was a lawyer and mathematician who served as mayor of Charleston, a member of Congress, and later a member of the Confederate Congress.

57. Rev. William Hooper, Address on Female Education, delivered before the Sedgewick Female Seminary, Feb. 27, 1847, pamphlet in Duke University library. The hazards to which the good reverend adverted—if a woman were too well educated the men might have trouble keeping up—are amusingly documented in the diary of Joseph LeConte's young daughter Emma, who had been reading Hitchcock's Religion and Geology: “I find a good many ideas there that M. in our talks advanced as his own—sometimes expressed in the identical words. I think he had recently read the book!” Diary of Emma LeConte, 5 February 1865, SHC UNC.

58. Hooper, Address on Female Education, p. 23.

59. Ibid., p. 9.

60. See Richard Gladney, Essays on Female Education (Columbia, S.C., 1832); William Carey Richards in The Orion 2 (December 1842): 120-23; Southern Literary Messenger 1 (May 1835): 519; 5 (September 1839): 597-601; President George Foster Pierce, Baccalaureate Address, 18 July 1840, reprinted in Wesleyan Alumni Review, May 1940; William H. Felton, Address Delivered at the Annual Commencement of the Madison Female College, 1853, pamphlet in Duke University library; Southern Ladies Companion, 1848-49, pp. 133-34; North Carolina Journal of Education, July 1859; Elias Marks, M. D., of Barhamville, S. C., Hints on Female Education (Columbia, S.C., 1851); Rev. Joseph R. Wilson, D. D., Female Training, a Sermon Delivered before the Friends of the Greensboro Female College, May 23, 1858, August, 1858, pamphlet in Duke University library. In view of all this discussion it is not surprising to find the years 1830-60 fertile in the founding of new colleges, seminaries, and academies for women. Many were ephemeral but a few struck deeper roots and made a serious effort. Some of these, as Wesleyan College at Macon, Georgia, and Greensboro College in North Carolina still exist. See I. M. E. Blandin, History of Higher Education of Women in the South prior to 1860 (New York: Neal Publishing Co., 1909).

61. Sanders, ed., “The Diary of Ruffin Wirt Tomlinson,” p. 254.

62. Hope Chamberlain, This Was Home [Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1938], pp. 85-87.

63. Quoted in ibid., p. 93.

64. Sarah Wadley Diary, 18 October 1860, SHC UNC.

65. Susan Cornwall Shewmake Journal, 1 May 1857, SHC UNC.

66. Anna Maria Green, The Journal of a Milledgeville Girl, 1861-67, ed. James C. Bonner (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1964).

67. Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girl's Diary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), pp. 249-50.

68. “Manner of Educating Females,” North Carolina Journal of Education, August 1859.

69. James M. Patton, “Serious Reading in Halifax County, 1860-1865,” North Carolina Historical Review 42 (April 1965): 169-79.

70. Helen Waite Papashvily, All the Happy Endings (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956).

71. See also Caroline Lee Hentz Diary, passim, SHC UNC.

72. Quoted in William Perry Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1951), p. 141.

73. Augusta Evans Wilson to J. L. M. Curry, 15 July 1863, J. L. M. Curry Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. See also her St. Elmo (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1896), pp. 404, 453-54, 482.

74. Diary from Dixie, p. 186, 24 January 1862.

75. Diary of Mahala P. Roach, 21 May 1859, SHC UNC.

76. One literary historian foreshadowed the thesis of this book in 1925 when he wrote: “The tradition did not so much unreasonably glorify the plantation woman as remain strangely silent about certain important, exceedingly important, phases of her existence. To apprehend dimly the vast unsaid, one need only imagine what a strictly realistic attitude might have made of the material. The tradition does not suggest, as a matter of fact, the status of women under the slavery regime. Honored with a real, a peculiar reverence, the boast and the idol of masculine society, she was, nevertheless, the pathetic victim of that society. The pleasant legend does not develop the excessive chaperonage which hedged her in, the denial of development which we recognize as hers by right, the utter economic dependence of these high-spirited women. Particularly notable is the failure of the tradition to hint at a certain orientalism which operated from the moment when the belle, abdicating her throne of social dominion, yielded herself to the program of the plantation lord. This ‘till death do us part’ theory had under the conditions of the old regime, a tremendous literalness fraught with terrible possibilities. In all romance there is a conspicuous absence of the psychology of lovely young girls who married young sports and found that matrimony locked a door and threw away the key, locked a door so thick that not even a cry of pain could ever penetrate to the outer world.” Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 180.