Idealization of Women
View of the exterior of a building housing a beauty show in Piedmont Park near Atlanta, Georgia, during the Cotton States and International Exposition. Courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center via Digital Library of Georgia.
In 1913, some white Southerners still sought the restoration of antebellum culture of honor, particularly what they had lost during the Reconstruction era. They clung to ideals of womanhood that glorified virtue and purity. A model Southern lady was virtuous, modest, and pious. She was happy to maintain a home, raise children, care for the sick, sew, tend a garden, and be a dutiful wife. Male investment in this ideal was so pronounced that preserving the characteristics of Southern “belles” was considered a means of preserving Southern honor.
Women far outnumbered men in Georgia after the Civil War, and many were forced out of economic necessity to labor alongside men as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or as mill and factory laborers. Their position as laborers contradicted the deep-seated ideals of white Southern womanhood that remained in the collective mindset, and thus, the ideal of Southern womanhood faced challenges.
Any perceived challenge to Southern honor regarding girls and women could result in violence from mobs or organized groups. The Ku Klux Klan’s oath even included the phrase “to be of special protection to female friends, widows, and their households,” conflating their resistance to economic and political change in the South with the sexuality of white women.
