A Southern Belle Goes North

Maxine had been called a lot of things in her lifetime, but never a Southern Belle! The title simply did not fit with her lifestyle or the history of her people in America. As she sat in a hotel bar in Hong Kong, China surrounded by colleagues from around the world, Maxine was surprised to hear herself described in such a way. She didnt know whether to be insulted that the history of her people was so poorly known that a black woman from the south was referred to as a Belle, or to be amused. She chose to be amused. Maxine sipped her Chardonnay. The wine relaxed her frontal lobe and she laughed out loud. She couldnt help thinking, I am my mothers daughter and she aint no Southern Belle. Back in the states, Maxine settled into the routine of work, family and friends with a new perspective. The China experience had been wonderfully positive and enlightening in ways that gave fresh eyes, ears and meaning to her life. "Southern Belle" details Maxine's quest for meaning in the concept of a 21st Century black southern belle. What she learned would strengthen her faith and bring her closer to the women whose lives had shaped her past, and helped to define who she was today.

Christmas Day of 2005 was the last time four generations of author Nora Burch's family would gather at the same table for a Holiday dinner. By the same time the following year, there were two empty seats. In this memoir, Burch describes the loss of first her mother and then her husband and narrates how she came to terms with her grief. In Go North, Young Lady, Burch tells how she returned to teaching and then made one of the most drastic decisions of her life. She left her home state of Louisiana, where she had lived all of her life, and relocated to Massachusetts in 2010. From information gathered in a journal, Burch shares a year's worth of recollections as she adapted to her new home 1,000 miles away. From red beans and rice, jambalaya, and Who Dat to quahogs, cawfee milk, and Go Pats, Go North, Young Lady recounts culture shock, first impressions, and travels experienced by a Southern girl after relocating to the North.

"Gardner's reading of a wide range of published and unpublished texts recovers a multifaceted vision of the South. For example, during the war, while its outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, women's writings sometimes reflected loyalty and optimism; at other times, they revealed doubts and a wavering resolve. According to Gardner, it was only in the aftermath of defeat that a more unified vision of the southern cause emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, white women - who remained deeply loyal to their southern roots - were raising fundamental questions about the meaning of southern womanhood in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a new edition of the autobiography of Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair (1883-1961). She started life innocently and happily on her father's Mississippi Delta plantation but went on to know deprivation and danger when she married Upton Sinclair, the crusading social activist. As she joined him in his struggles to rescue the disinherited of the earth, collaborating with him in writing a shelf of books, she gave up the moonlight and magnolias but not her grace. After her death, Sinclair recalled her as the loveliest woman I have ever known. She moved North with him and began an exhilarating new life. He was a Socialist and the celebrated muckraker whose novel The Jungle (1906) was an exposé of the meatpacking industry. Later, in 1943, he would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon's Teeth. Through him she became involved in social causes and came to know many of America's intellectuals including such eminent figures in the literary and political worlds as Walter Lippman, Sinclair Lewis, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and Art Young. With her husband she traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Her story is filled with many great names--including Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks--whom she and Sinclair counted among their friends. As a child she once sat on Jefferson Davis's knee. In her girlhood she was instructed in the southern graces. Later she would be immersed in the world of demonstrations, distress, and political pamphleteering for the liberal causes she and her husband espoused. Their marriage of forty-eight years was extraordinary and happy. Sinclair recalled her as the helpmeet of a man who set out to help in the ending of poverty and war in the world. . . . It required many crusades in which he bankrupted himself and her as well. It required a year-long entanglement in a bitter political campaign [for the California governorship]. She helped him to write and publish three million books and pamphlets. Of her book he said, This is the story of a southern belle, told by a real one.

Yankee Doodle--Southern Belle contains Felice's personal story of her journey from New York to North Carolina. She and her husband make the move with their three young daughters determined to start a new life for their family in the South. They begin their move with no current means of income yet confidently set out for North Carolina. This story is about realizing the many differences of living in a southern town and adapting to the cultural changes. She takes you on their journey of raising their three daughters and building a business. With the rough times of the economy, they strive hard to survive and support themselves. Yet when Felice receives a diagnosis of breast cancer, her family feels devastated, scared, and worried about their future. Felice's faith in God gives her strength and keeps her family positive during the uncertain times ahead. This is Felice's story and how she encounters the struggle that many women face with cancer.

Candace Bailey’s exploration of the intertwining worlds of music and gender shows how young southern women pushed the boundaries of respectability to leave their unique mark on a patriarchal society. Before 1861, a strictly defined code of behavior allowed a southern woman to identify herself as a “lady” through her accomplishments in music, drawing, and writing, among other factors. Music permeated the lives of southern women, and they learned appropriate participation through instruction at home and at female training institutions. A belle’s primary venue was the parlor, where she could demonstrate her usefulness in the domestic circle by providing comfort and serving to enhance social gatherings through her musical performances, often by playing the piano or singing. The southern lady performed in public only on the rarest of occasions, though she might attend public performances by women. An especially talented lady who composed music for a broader audience would do so anonymously so that her reputation would remain unsullied. The tumultuous Civil War years provided an opportunity for southern women to envision and attempt new ways to make themselves useful to the broader, public society. While continuing their domestic responsibilities and taking on new ones, young women also tested the boundaries of propriety in a variety of ways. In a broad break with the past, musical ladies began giving public performances to raise money for the war effort, some women published patriotic Confederate music under their own names, supporting their cause and claiming public ownership for their creations. Bailey explores these women’s lives and analyzes their music. Through their move from private to public performance and publication, southern ladies not only expanded concepts of social acceptability but also gained a valued sense of purpose. Music and the Southern Belle places these remarkable women in their social context, providing compelling insight into southern culture and the intricate ties between a lady’s identity and the world of music. Augmented by incisive analysis of musical compositions and vibrant profiles of composers, this volume is the first of its kind, making it an essential read for devotees of Civil War and southern history, gender studies, and music.

The fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as a compelling and incisive chronicle of the Jazz Age and Depression Era. This collection explores the degree to which Fitzgerald was in tune with, and keenly observant of, the social, historical and cultural contexts of the 1920s and 1930s. Original essays from forty international scholars survey a wide range of critical and biographical scholarship published on Fitzgerald, examining how it has evolved in relation to critical and cultural trends. The essays also reveal the micro-contexts that have particular relevance for Fitzgerald's work - from the literary traditions of naturalism, realism and high modernism to the emergence of youth culture and prohibition, early twentieth-century fashion, architecture and design, and Hollywood - underscoring the full extent to which Fitzgerald internalized the world around him.