Kappa Alpha, my fraternity at Randolph-Macon.
********************************
“Treat a woman like a lady, And your lady like a queen….”
Charlie Daniels
Ashley Judd’s
recitation of “I’m a Nasty Woman”
at the “women’s” march on Washington D.C. splashed across every media
outlet in America. Judd proudly proclaimed to be a feminist and then
launched into a verbal diatribe against “racism, fraud, conflict of
interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy,
misogyny, ignorance and white privilege.” To Judd and the poem’s author,
a sweet little Tennessee donut shop employee named Nina Donovan,
the symbol of all this mischief and oppression are “Confederate flags
being tattooed across my city. Maybe the South actually is going to rise
again, maybe for some, it never really fell.”
Somehow being a strong woman today requires both a high level of
“ignorance” and the desire to get in the gutter. Getting nasty with
Ashley were Madonna and a host of other leftist activists who think the
only way to get a man’s attention (and isn’t that the point?) is to grab
their crotch and act like a spoiled teenager. Being a man is another
thing, something Southerners of both sexes know something about.
Take Augusta Jane Evans of Mobile, Alabama for example. Neither Judd,
nor Madonna, nor Donovan would consider her a feminist. She proudly
waved the Confederate flag and watched hundreds of men suffer for the
cause as a nurse. For her, the South never fell, because an America
without the Southern tradition would have been an America without its
soul. She was highly intelligent. Her books require the reader to have a
level of education I’m sure Ms. Donovan—and for that matter both Judd
and Madonna—lacks. She never voted, did not think it was proper for
women to vote, and never jumped around on a
stage grabbing her crotch and gyrating to “express yourself.”
But she did express herself, quite well in fact.
Evans was one of the best-selling authors of the 1860s. Her novel
St. Elmo
lined bookshelves across the United States, no small feat for an
unreconstructed Southern belle. Women often required their daughters and
granddaughters to read it. It might be a stretch, but one could
probably assume that no nasty pink hatted woman at the Washington D.C.
rally has ever cracked open the book. Their loss, for they are missing
one of the more important feminist novels of the nineteenth century.
Evans held the cause of women’s suffrage in low regard and scoffed at
“blue-stockings,” educated women who shunned the traditional role of
wife, mother, and care-giver for politics and speaking engagements. Her
anti-suffrage position puts her at odds with modern society, but she was
not alone in the nineteenth century. While the modern reader may laugh
at her quaint provincialism, her reasoning, made clear in
St. Elmo, stemmed from her faith and her dedication to “womankind.”
Edna Earl, the main character in
St. Elmo, is a devout,
pious, pure, well-read, beautiful, and intelligent young woman, the
model of Christian virtue. She falls in love with an immoral scoundrel,
St. Elmo, but does not allow herself to express her interest because he
is unworthy of her love. She pities him and prays for him, and though
her heart is his, she never betrays her feelings. As a result, she
spends much of her young life engaged in study, in nursing sick
children, writing critically acclaimed books and articles, and fighting
off suitors who boast high social status and money but who cannot win
her pure heart. In the end, Edna is able to reform St. Elmo. He returns
to Christ, becomes a minister, and marries Edna. While it is a great
romance,
St. Elmo is also a political tale interwoven with social critique.
For example, Evans, through Edna Earl, argued that women should
“jealously [contend] for every woman’s right which God and nature had
decreed the sex. The right to be learned, wise, noble, useful, in
woman’s divinely limited sphere; the right to influence and exalt the
circle in which she moved; the right to mount the sanctified bema of her
own quiet hearthstone; the right to modify and direct her husband’s
opinions . . . the right to make her children ornaments to their nation .
. . the right to advise, to plead, to pray; the right to make her desk a
Delphi, if God so permitted; the right to be all that the phrase
‘noble, Christian woman’ means.” But she cautioned her fellow woman
against involving herself in anything that might “trail her heaven-born
purity through the dust and mire of political strife. . .
.”
In
St. Elmo, Evans described her heroine’s writing career in words that could just as easily be applied to her own:
The tendency of the age was to equality and communism,
and this, she contended was undermining the golden thrones shining in
the blessed and hallowed light of the hearth, whence every true woman
ruled the realm of her own family. Regarding every pseudo “reform” which
struck down the social and political distinction of the sexes, as a
blow that crushed one of the pillars of woman’s throne, she earnestly
warned the Crowned Heads of the danger to be apprehended from the
unfortunate and deluded female malcontents . . . and to proud happy
mothers, guarded by Praetorian bands of children, she reiterated the
assurance that “Those who rock the cradle rule the world.” Most
carefully she sifted the records of history, tracing in every epoch the
sovereigns of the hearth-throne who had reigned wisely and contentedly,
ennobling and refining humanity; and she proved by illustrious examples
that the borders of the feminine realm could not be enlarged, without
rendering the throne unsteady, and subverting God’s law of order.
Politics, Evans pointed out, has never proved to be the salvation of
the human race. This is still true today. Women, most importantly
mothers and wives, had long been the calming factor, the guiding hand,
and the nurturing vessel of a prosperous and peaceful people. Evans
believed neither voting nor political office were necessary when women
already held such power over men.
Every nasty feminist at the Washington rally failed to understand
that the “misogyny” of the nineteenth century was in fact a
manifestation of a
respect for the fairer sex, a realization
that men were, and are, fragile creatures that need a soft hand and a
moral compass that often only women can provide, and that women were, in
fact, superior members of society. “Women and children first” had real
meaning. Acting “nasty” appeals to the animalistic side of man, but it
debases rather than elevates womankind. Women might as well put up a
sign in neon lights: “Bring out your clubs and procreate, caveman. No
conversation nor courtship necessary.”
This isn’t about voting. It’s about manners and refinement, of
culture. Edna Earl would be a much more enjoyable challenge than Ashley
Judd. But maybe that is old fashioned. Real ladies did not show up in
Washington. Treating your woman like a lady and your lady like a queen
is too “Old South.” Then again, maybe that is exactly what America needs
from both sexes.
