Jadrienne Myhre, winner of Renfro award for 2008 Girls School

GREG JINKERSON writes:

My wife and I came across the PBS documentary Southern Belle two nights ago and when I realized what I was watching, namely modern young ladies reenacting antebellum Southern culture in a kind of historical school, The Thinking Housewife blog leapt to mind. What we did get to see of the film was extraordinary. Here is a link to the film’s website.

The film itself is, I think, quite balanced in its presentation of the Athenaeum Girls’ School in Columbia, Tennessee, an institution whose existence I was thrilled to discover. Every summer since 1990, an all-volunteer staff of historically-minded locals have invited girls to gather in Columbia for the purpose of learning about the life of the mythic Southern Belle circa 1861. In Southern Belle, cameras were permitted for the first time to follow the events of one summer’s session of instruction in such feminine arts as the hoop skirt, voice, diction, and dancing. For the first few moments of the movie, I couldn’t quite tell what I was seeing. It was a bit outlandish, initially, to see girls and women wearing actual dresses and doing needlework, and to hear the adults reproving the girls for chattering. No permissive parenting here! The instructor is overheard telling some of the girls that the goal of one particular exercise was to cultivate grace. In another scene, the girls are shown in full antebellum costume being introduced to young men at an evening ball, though most of the boys are wearing clothing typical of 2011 young male fashion. This sharp contrast in dress between the modern-clad boys and the beautifully outfitted girls underscored even further the point of the ball: it was the role of the young ladies to behave graciously toward the young men, no matter how anachronistic the girls may have felt. To this end, there is a scene in which several of the school’s staff are shown privately rebuking one of the young ladies for having been overheard criticizing one of her partner’s dancing. As the ball’s female chaperone put it, “It is not easy for us to find these boys to come to our dance. It’s not easy for them to take the time off of work, and it is neither fair nor ladylike of you to criticize them.”

When I first ran across the movie, I wondered at first if it was Masterpiece Theater, and if so, I was expecting to see something very entertaining, or possibly nothing more than the usual anti-Southern revisionism/feminism. But not a bit of it. There was a scene of the girls doing needlework together, with a voiceover commentary from one of the school’s instructors. In the next shot, a breakaway interview with one of the young women who was still wearing her historical costume, she stated that she enjoys the school mostly for its power of addressing the taboo issue of God-given differences between men and women! I was just rejoicing at this when the girl doubled back, and stated that she didn’t see any contradiction between the traditional beauty of femininity and the modern girl’s pursuit of corporate success. This young lady was exceedingly well spoken, eventually being chosen as the summer’s Most Ladylike, but her stunning non-sequitur gives you a very clear glimpse of the task that traditionalists must face when attempting to communicate traditional womanhood to today’s girls. My wife’s comment was, “She started out saying something shockingly true, and almost ruined it with the usual lie.” In other footage, some of the girls seem far less influenced by feminist assumptions than the first girl; one young lady even seemed to be entirely unaware that studying feminine customs could be anything but charming, saying that she and her mother “Always love to go and get our old-timey pictures taken at places like Dollywood.” She spoke with a decidedly Southern drawl, demonstrating that even today, there remain pockets of the South in which the young people are still soundly un-self-conscious of the national demonization of their region.

I think that the film’s logo on the website is annoyingly masochistic, a Victorian silhouette of a girl against the Confederate battle flag, wherein the flag is situated so as to depict the girl as being simultaneously choked and gagged by those nasty stars and bars. It is a very pleasant surprise to see the dependably Marxist PBS allowing onto the air a Southern rejoinder to all of the anti-traditional claptrap that is dominating mainstream discussion of the Civil War sesquicentennial. On the website itself, of course, PBS (or perhaps the filmmakers, who are themselves longtime PBS affiliates) felt the need to include reams of indignant quotations from the thought police, but I still applaud the film itself. Some of the commentariat felt the need to remind viewers that the Old South was guilty of slavery, and that by extension, all approval of Old Southern culture is tantamount to racism etc. So as is so often the case, this project is a mixed bag. But I must say that it was incredibly encouraging to hear the interviews with the terrific men and women who run the school, and who obviously believe in what they are doing without experiencing an iota of spurious white guilt. Hooray for this glimmer of hope in Dixie, and kudos to PBS both for funding and airing such a worthy project.

                                         — Comments —

Joe Long writes:

Regarding Southern belles and their rich heritage, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room’s current exhibit “Bold Banners” features 13 early-war Confederate unit flags – the sort created by groups of women, for particular units of men whom they knew personally, headed off to war. The designs and words on them were usually the result of a conscientious feminine committee; the embroidery, their own work; the painted designs, done by a professional artist paid by them.

Andrew Marvell wrote: “How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the oak or bays…” Where a wreath is featured as part of a flag design, the choice of what KIND of wreath is very significant; for instance, a Low Country unit features rice plants (with interwoven flowers), while another has beautifully-worked laurel and oak (complete with embroidered acorns) to symbolize strength and victory.

The contract between brave men and faithful women is implicit in each flag, explicit on at least one: the Lexington Guards flag says, “Defend This, the Home of Your Mothers, Wives and Sisters”, and some of the flags specify “Presented by the Ladies” (as if there were any chance the men would forget”.

I have noticed that schoolchildren today usually have some notion that “women dressed up like men to serve in the armies.” This is a fact, indeed; dozens, even hundreds did so, with varying success and mixed motives. But the emphasis on the occasional virago has overshadowed the larger influence (North and South, and indeed well beyond that single war) of women who were carrying out their traditional roles, and under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

My favorite South Carolina Confederate monument may be the Women’s Monument, at the State Capitol in Columbia, placed in front of the Capitol building in the late nineteenth century, and paid for with funds raised by the Confederate veterans. Their sentiment was not a partisan one, in this case (though doubtless held with more poignancy and fervor in the defeated South): their gratitude was to the people who had preserved their lives, had given them something to come home to in the end.

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