The Belle: Magnolia and Iron

Louisiana Feminist Annabelle Walker, demurely dressed in a hoop skirt and twirling a parasol, demonstrated in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment last year. "A man shies away from an overly aggressive female," warns Gale Childers, who nonetheless has been aggressive enough to be a South Carolina bank branch manager at the age of 30. Alabama State Treasurer Melba Till Allen owes much of her success at the polls to her charming, ultrafeminine manner. Says she, "I don't believe that a woman could win in Alabama if she were not a lady." Yet Allen recently showed up for an official appearance in Birmingham driving a pickup truck complete with CB radio and gun rack.

These women and many others point up one of the South's many paradoxes: the Southern woman, long limned in a moonlight-and-magnolia image, is emerging as rapidly as her Northern sister, perhaps faster. But she feels the tug of a centuries-old code of Southern femininity: Be a lady. Be the moral conscience of the family. Let your husband protect you from the baser things of life. Do not challenge or compete with men. Be nice to everyone, regardless of your actual feelings.

New Values. Many women are bending that code to accommodate new values and new jobs. As a born-again Christian, Alabama State Auditor Bettye Frink prayed hard as she tried to decide whether it was fair to her family for her to pursue politics. She concluded it was--"if I would leave my problems at work and not take them home." Not long ago Leone Ackerly, 31, a bored middle-class housewife, decided to hire herself out as a maid. Her mother went into shock. Now Ackerly runs a string of six cleaning services. "My mother just thinks I'm the smartest thing since the mousetrap."

As recently as a generation ago, a job for a woman was unthinkable in most upper-and middle-class Southern white homes. Today, with urbanization, feminism, television and sheer economic pinch all playing a part, it is routine. Lynn McColl, 38, of Winston-Salem, became a schoolteacher when financial misfortune struck her family in the late '60s. "Now it's not essential that I work --except to me," she says. "My husband is very supportive. He is just a prince of a man." More and more, Southern women work as telephone linemen, ministers, welders, lawyers and executives. Barriers are falling for black as well as white women. Says Anna Grant, a black Atlantan, "I thought that if only I could marry a man who wore clean overalls, then I'd have it made." She has become a sociologist at Morehouse College.

From 1960 to 1970, the number of women in the South's civilian labor force rose more than 40%; much of the increase was in technical and professional jobs. Women have accomplished this quiet revolution almost circumspectly --taking a cue from their mothers by never attacking the old code headon. "As long as she was respectable," says Duke University Historian Anne Firor Scott, "a Southern woman could get away with an awful lot." A young Georgia-born woman--now a writer in New York--recalls her mother drumming into her head: "Do, but don't be seen doing." Says Molly Haskell, a Manhattan movie critic who was raised in Virginia, "One day one of my teachers said to us, 'Women rule the world.' But it was supposed to be a secret."

Hollywood movies of the '30s and '40s left no doubt about the Southern woman: she was a Jezebel. In fact, the traditional problem is not rebellion but "niceness," or what Journalist Florence King calls "the compulsive need to be sweet." A Southern woman is obliged to smooth over all social irritations with good manners and a smile. Literary Critic Josephine Hendin, writing about the late Georgia Novelist Flannery O'Connor, speaks of a Southern "politeness that engulfs every other emotion." "No matter how bad an evening has been," says Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer, a native of New Jersey, "Southern women never fail to say, 'Y'all come back and see us again soon' when they might want to say, 'Drop dead.' " Critic Haskell recalls having to take "sort of the Anita Loos approach" to society. "You ask the great big man what he's interested in." At its best, this politeness produces the immensely attractive surface of Southern life. At its worst, it produces an ingrained falseness and bottled-up anger. Billie Carr, a Memphis-born clinical psychiatric counselor, says, "I was raised to hide myself. I was used to being two people."

She adds, "I was a C-- student. Smart girls weren't supposed to get boy friends." Says Messer, "Psychiatrists see Southern women because of their rage and resentment at having to bury their feelings. Northern women tend to be treated by psychiatrists more for depression and paranoia. There is much more hysteria in Southern patients." But, Messer notes, change is in the air: fewer Southern women are hiding anger and frustration behind the image of the happy gentlewoman.

Another paradox of Southern life is that the "niceness" image overlays a tradition of strong women. Says Ackerly: "Oh, we all love to see Gone With the Wind, and how Scarlett flits around with nothing to worry about except how small her waist is. But when it came time, Scarlett wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty. The Southern woman may seem soft and sweet, but she can do almost anything." Irma Lee Shepherd, a psychologist and professor at Georgia State University, agrees. Says she: "Girls who might whisper, simper and have the vapors at a dance often were very strong women who knew Latin and Greek and had developed strong wills from their fathers. There was the external myth and the role separation, but underneath there was a lot of role switching. Many girls were handy about solving problems about the farm, and many boys were handy in the kitchen."

Iron Hand. Atlanta Therapist Jean Harsch cites Rosalynn Carter and Betty Talmadge as examples of strong women who can appear pretty and helpless. "The rest of the country," she says, "makes the mistake of seeing those as ingrained ways of being rather than learned skills." One Episcopal priest who has spent eight years in the South says he has never seen so many "brutally powerful women. They will say, 'Oh, don't say damn or I'll faint' and then castrate the man they're with."

Both black and white Southerners, in fact, basically live in a matriarchal society. The wife usually rules the home with an iron hand. Because of the links between church, family and community in the South, this often translates into great social power for matriarchs like "Miss Lillian," Jimmy Carter's mother.

Pauline Glance, a Georgia State University psychologist, thinks that the tradition of being both gentle and strong gives Southern women some advantage over their Northern sisters, who more commonly feel that the two qualities conflict. "Women in both the North and South are struggling with problems of their feelings about themselves," she says. "I think Southern women will find them easier to solve."

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