The “Southern Lady”
The “Southern Lady”
• Affluent Southern white women lived very similar to Northern middle
class women.
• Their lives centered around the home and their families. Even less
frequently than in the North did “genteel” southern white women
engage in public activities or find income producing employment.
• In social aspects though southern women lived differently then those
in the North. Southern men gave particular importance to the
“defense” of women.
• It most cases white men in the South were even more dominant and
the women were even more submissive.
The “Southern Lady”
• Most Southern women lived on farms so they were very isolated and
the family economy was very important which lead the man to be the
more dominant of the two. They could not see a world outside of
their children and work as a wife as being important.
• For many white women who lived on modest size farms women
engaged in spinning, weaving, and other production; they
participated in agricultural tasks; they helped supervise the slave
workforce.
• On large plantations though this would not happen. They were
considered a “plantation mistress” became an ornament for her
husband than an active part of the economy of the society.
Quote and Picture from a magazine article
Man is daring and confident, woman is diffident
and unassuming; man is great in action, woman
in suffering; man shines abroad, woman at
home; man talks to convince, woman to
persuade and please; man has a rugged heart,
woman a soft and tender one; man prevents
misery, woman relieves it; man has science,
woman taste; man has judgement, woman
sensibility; man is a being of justice, woman of
mercy.---Galena (Ill.)Advertiser 7 March 1835.
The “Southern Lady”
• Southern white women also had less access to education that their
northern counterparts.
• Nearly a quarter of all white women over twenty were completely
illiterate. The few female “academies” in the South trained women
primarily to be suitable wives.
• The southern white birth rate was about 20% higher then that of the
nation as a whole. The infant death rate was higher also. By the age of
five half of the children would die.
• Slave labor helped women with having to do intensive labor on the
fields but it also threatened their relationships with their husbands.
The “Southern Lady”
• Male slave owners had frequent affairs with their slaves and they
bore children that joined the labor force and were constant reminders
of their husbands infidelity.
• Upper class white women in the South were particularly energetic in
defending the class lines between themselves in those that were of
the poorer class.
• Most Southerners were referred to as “plain folk” who owned a few
slaves, with whom they worked and lived far more closely than did
the larger planters.
• Most in fact ¾ of all white families owned no slaves.
The Plain Folk
During the 1850s, the number
of non slaveholding
landowners increased much
faster than the slaveholding
landowners.
There really was very little
hope of any class movement
due to the poor education
that they were exposed to at
this time.
The Plain Folk
• In 1860 there were 260 southern colleges and universities, and
25,000 students enrolled which were only the very wealthy. This
made more then half of the students enrolled in the US.
• The elementary and secondary schools were inferior to those of the
Northeast and a higher proportion of whites were illiterate that in
other parts of the country.
• The majority of the South was a modest farmers who went along with
the wealthy really being in control. The Question was why would they
go along with this?
How Schools Rank Today By State
The Plain Folk
• One group of non slaving owning whites did the. These were southern
highlanders, the “hill people” who lived in the Appalachian ranges
east of the Mississippi, in the Ozarks in the “back country” areas cut
off from the commercial world of the plantation system.
• They practiced a simple form of subsistence agriculture, owned
practically no slaves, and had a proud sense of seclusion.
• They produced almost no surplus for the market, had little access to
money, and often bartered for the goods they could not grow
themselves.