The Culture of Old South - Myths and Reality - Literature review Example

Paradoxes of the Old South What we think of when we consider the culture of the Old South today generally refers to the romantic images painted in books and on screen. They consist of elaborate homes, rolling acreage planted with profitable green growing things and fancy white people idling on the porches or attending lavish balls. Ideals in this society focused on honor, gentility and quiet country idleness. Men were expected to be wealthy and idle, able to engage in the common activities of the elite such as hunting, managing a workforce and presiding over his home. Women were expected to wear beautiful gowns rich in cloth and engage in gentile activities that didn’t stress them too much or place them in the harsh sun for excessive periods of time. Black people were barely considered at all and were, at best, seen in the background the scenes in one’s head, with a serving tray or assisting a woman with her dressing rituals. Even when daily life did not match up with these ideals, the belief was that they were working toward them and that the Southerner was the final champion of the highest ethical standards known to man. However, very few of these ideals were actually true. While there were numerous planters that may have fallen within these parameters, they were only able to do so by exploiting the people around them. The South survived on the backs of its women and slaves in a way that it rarely acknowledged openly, introducing a tremendous paradox between how they saw themselves as compared to how they really lived. This is most easily understood in the stories of the ‘servant’ members of this society, the women and slaves/former slaves. Women Following the end of the Civil War, the United States went into a period of rebuilding and redefinition in many respects. One of the ideas that developed during this period among the middle class of the country was the idea of women as the center of the home. Scholarship on this issue brings into focus some of the issues of class and reproduction women faced during the antebellum period. Through the virtues of piety, purity and submissiveness, the woman was defined first as a pious and pure daughter and sister and then as a submissive wife within the confines of the male protector, making her suitable only for a domestic role. Her prime motive following marriage was to provide for the hearth, meaning food, clothing, children and all that was necessary for the continuance of the family line. When it came to marriage and having children, it was said “Let no caprice or inconsistency on your part becloud a prospect so deservedly a subject of complacency to your friends and so full of promises of earthly good” (Sklar, 1973: 36). Although the middle class women of the North were expected to confine their activities to the home, many of the women of the South were expected to do much more while still remaining within the Northern definitions of femininity. According to Stephanie McCurry, the role of women in the South didn’t differ very much after the war than they had been before the war, at least among the middle classes. “By childbirth and childraising, women reproduced the family for the next generation. By their physical labor, farm women produced household goods for which their counterparts in towns and cities were shopping in stores; the labor of farm women kept their families out of debt” (McCurry, 2002: 145). It was primarily because of the production of women within the home, McCurry says, that the South was able to separate itself from the North at all, making the Civil War possible, and the production of the women again that enabled the family to survive through the Reconstruction and later hardships. In the antebellum South, farm women were able to keep their families together and cared for through the sweat of their brow. They produced everything that could be produced at home, saving the family the need to purchase the product while also ensuring the family was not required to live without it. “Indeed, the continued high levels of household production throughout the antebellum period point to one local manifestation of the systematic difference between farm women’s work North and South. If yeoman farmers escaped relations of debt and dependency with local merchants and planters, they knew that the accomplishment was as much their wives’ as their own” (McCurry, 2002: 147). When produced in excess of the family’s need, the production efforts of the women could also be turned into cash on hand or bartered with other local farmers for necessities that could not be made in the home. Thus, although their labor was officially unnoticed, women in the south gained a certain degree of independence among their men because of the acknowledged partnership involved even as their products continued to be necessary for the betterment of the family. Farm women were also not the pampered gender class that is often depicted in films like “Gone with the Wind.” There is ample evidence that farm women of the south worked in the fields just as much as the men and the slaves. This was not work that came down to questions of class or gender but was instead a simple practicality. Farming operates on a time schedule based on weather conditions and natural growth cycles. It cannot be simply rescheduled or postponed until the farmer is able to hire enough help, purchase enough slaves or get around to doing everything himself. “Contemporaries of all classes were aware that the labor yeoman farmers commanded in the field included that of their wives and daughters; most yeomen simply did not own enough slaves to free female family members from field work” (McCurry, 2002: 148). They are contrasted with the daughters and wives of the planters, who were rarely, if ever, found in the fields and only then for inspection and not work. While the upper classes obviously valued a sharp division of labor among gender lines, the practicality of women’s contributions to the home and the independence and success secured thus prevented the kind of dependence of women on men exhibited in the ideals of the North. Regardless of her usefulness in the fields, the prime responsibility of women in this period was to produce and raise children. However, childbirth was one of the most terrifying events of a woman’s life. Without very modern innovations in medicine, it still would be. Mortality rates for women were high and pain-relieving epidurals were many years from being developed. At the same time, there were no easy pills to take to prevent pregnancies as women were expected to produce. According to James Mohr (1979), there was a significant decline in birth rates in the early nineteenth century particularly in urban areas where a high number of children did not necessarily equate to additional hands to help with the farm work. “In the mid-eighteenth century, the average rural woman could expect to face childbirth eight or nine times; by the early nineteenth century that number had dropped to six and in some urban areas to four” (Mohr, 1979: 184). The reason for this, according to Mohr, was through conscious choice on the part of the woman by marrying later in life and through abstinence. When this wasn’t successful and an unwanted pregnancy was discovered, women during this period in time would sometimes seek to abort. Because there were no laws against this, Mohr indicates the woman was generally not vilified as long as there had not been any stirrings of life yet. However, the women of the Southern farms, primarily those belonging to the yeoman farmers, had the prime responsibility of creating the next labor force. As is revealed by McCurry, it was frequently only through the necessities of childbirth that the wife was able to escape the labors of the fields (McCurry, 2002). As can be seen through the discussion of this class of women during the antebellum period, the products of women were of prime importance in maintaining the success and independence of the household. This was true not only in their abilities to create products needed by the family and thus avoid having to purchase them, but also by producing excess that could be sold and in participating in the necessary field work on the farm. The more children she could bring into the world, the greater the possibility for the success of the farm as the children could also be put to work within a few years. At the same time, the birth of many sons would mean it was less necessary for women to work in the field (and therefore freed to be able to produce more goods in the house). As a result, the process of abortion came to be considered a crime against the family (Mohr, 1979). This was because abortion removed the possibility for greater wealth through the products of the two hands of the child not born. To give the cause greater weight, issues of morality and religion were attached and abortion was made a crime in the legislative books, taking this important decision out of the hands of the woman and placing it in the hands of the man. Black people Black people in the South following the Civil War were not necessarily any better off as freemen than they were as slaves. Although they had gained rights through the federal government, local governments and daily realities kept them suppressed and in abject poverty (Ruef, 2003: 445). While the rest of the world called them free, their experience told them they remained severely restricted within a class of slaves. According to some studies, if it hadn’t been for the educational interventions of the Freedmen’s Bureau coupled with the widespread black diaspora toward the North that followed the ending of the war, the South might still be operating with their former highly oppressive states (Ruef, 2003). Within this type of shifting society, one can see the continuous hope of a better future in the willingness to move as well as the despair of ever achieving any higher status than that of slave in the constant struggle to overcome the bureaucratic machine. These ideas are reflected again and again in the literature that was produced in this period. A common motif is the concept that the physical chains of the slaves had become metaphysical shackles on the black race visible only to the black people constrained by them and the masters that continued to ensure they remained in place. Their former defenders in the North paid little attention to the actual local, county and state legislation that continued to hold the black man under the white man’s thumb. “The widespread emblems of the supplicant slave, the ragtag runaway, and the abused slave woman suggested a closed set of choices for antebellum identity: either as white/master/abuser/father/voyeur/reader or as black/slave/victim/mother/object/brute” (Chaney, 2008). While many writers of the period felt constrained by these two options, other writers were attempting to illustrate the way out of this dichotomy into a more open and promising future. “Ex-slave authors tenuously inhabited both of those contrary positions, they found them intolerable and engineered ways of disembodying and disconnection the conventions” (Chaney, 2008). References Chaney, Michael A. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. McCurry, Stephanie. “Women’s Work: The Gender Division of Labor in Yeoman Households of South Carolina before the Civil War.” Cited in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. Linda K. Kerber & Jane Sherron De Hart (Eds.). Oxford University Press, 2002: 145. Mohr, James C. “Abortion in America.” Cited in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. Linda K. Kerber & Jane Sherron De Hart (Eds.). Oxford University Press, 1979: 184. Ruef, Martin & Ben Fletcher. “Legacies of American Slavery: Status Attainment among Southern Blacks after Emancipation.” Social Forces. Vol. 82, I. 2, (December 2003): 445-480. Sklar, Katherine. Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. London, England: Yale University Press, 1973: 36. Read More