Being Ladies

The English language seems particularly well adapted to change, sometimes reflecting and sometimes even foretelling political shifts like the one we are now experiencing. Among other things we can expect, we women are likely to find our roles constricted, not necessarily by legal means, but because of the conservative bent in the country as a whole; a return to earlier definitions of what it means to be female is often led by women who seem by some weird crook in our nature to return easily, under male manipulations, to old-fashioned ideas.

An example that is particularly aggravating to me is the return of the term “lady” or “ladies.” Admittedly, this is an improvement over the use of “you guys,” so prevalent in the past few years for mixed-gender groups and even for groups of women. I always bristled when I heard it since it is an example of the front loading of the masculine in all situations.

But now our language has shifted again and we are being called, often, ladies. Of course no one with any sense is defined by a term, but this change has led me to think about the meaning of the lady, or “ladyhood” as the inspired historian, Drew Gilpin Faust, illustrates it in her fascinating study, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War which I’ve been reading as I prepare for my next big writing project.

With many examples, Faust shows that the suffering of women in the South during the Civil War, left alone for the first time in their lives as the men they’d depended on enlisted (and one out of four draft-age men died), began to question the foundations of their ladyhood in dependency. Dependency has its charms, and a lot of the long-outdated fictions (but still believed; look at the perennial popularity of Gone With the Wind!) show the crinoline-clad beauties of the antebellum period with their balls and their beaux. But now that the balls were finished and the beaux gone or dead, the stark need to take care of themselves and their families and often of large, slaveholding plantations required skills in management they had never even imagined. Letters addressed to soldiers pleading with or commanding them to come home and take care of their women had no effect. 

As in Winchester Virginia, where the women cursed and spat at the occupying Union soldiers, an aggression they’d never imagined became a patriotic duty. Mary Lee wondered in her diary, “Will we ever be gentle, refined ladies again?”

Women in New Orleans showed such open hostility when it was occupied by Union troops under General Butler—they called him Brute Butler—that he ended the behavior by ordering that “hereafter any female shall by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or private of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her vocation”—that is, as a whore. The order was immediately effective, proving that “correct behavior” in every situation was the most important requirement for ladyhood.

As we again face a form of invasion, of lies and distortions, not soldiers, will we again be crippled by our adherence to older forms of “correct behavior”? Do we still secretly yearn to be called ladies, to be “sweet”—another adjective applied more frequently now to women—or will we show our teeth?

The answer requires some self-searching.

In Women, Politics The Civil War Drew Gilpin Faust