Sherry Chandler

The Southern Belle

If, in 1777, Esther Whitley was defeating all the men in a shooting match, and if in 1789, Jenny Wiley was trekking through the wilderness to escape the Shawnee, within the lifetimes of both these women, as early as 1820, women in Kentucky had transformed into a collection of Scarlet O’Haras.

Here is Richard C. Wade in The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities 1790-1830 (Univ Chicago Press, 1959):

The most sheltered group in transmontane cities were the daughters of the rich, whom Mrs. Trollope called “a privileged class.” Carefully guarded by socially sensitive mothers, screened from the world outside from birth, and educated in fashionable schools, they lived well removed from the rest of urban society. Leisure and frivolity increasingly occupied their time. Timothy Flint, himself a representative of the mercantile community, complained of their total uselessness, asserting that they never put “their own lily hands to domestic drudgery” and that they had no higher interests than dressing smartly, reading romances, and playing the piano. . . .

Nor did this relaxed life end with marriage. Matrimony merely set off new social rounds, with domestics handling the household chores. [pp. 208-209]

According to Wade, these domestics were more and more often African-American slaves.

According to Helen Deiss Irvin in Women in Kentucky, Mary Austin Holley, who moved to Lexington from Boston in 1818 when her huband became president of Transylvania University — a move she did not want to make:

. . .was astonished that local ladies made morning calls in silks and satins. By Boston standards, they overdressed. Like her uncle Moses Austin a critical newcome to Kentucky, Mrs. Holley clearly regarded her new acquaintances as pretentious, dull, perhaps a bit nouveau riche.

Nor did she care for another new feminine style: reticence and submissiveness. . . . Mrs. Holley found the new reticence boring. . . . “[She] preferred the more forthright manners of the early Republic in which she had been reared.” [pp. 31 -32]

Mrs. Holley wrote poetry and, according to her biographer Rebecca Smith Lee, read the works of that shocking Swiss intellectual, Madame de Staël. She thought Boston the pinnacle of American intellectual society and had no desire to move to some frontier backwater, to some troubled upstart college run by dour Presbyterians. But her husband thought he could rise above all that. Besides, he was delighted to be courted by none other than Henry Clay.

He was also beguiled to find paved streets.

Elizabeth F. Ellet, writing her history of Pioneer Women of the West in 1873, also marked the decline:

The progress of improvement, art, and luxury tends to change the female character so that even a return of the perils of war, the necessity for exertion, would not develop in it the strength which belonged to the matrons who nursed the infancy of the Republic.

Alas, I think it was all a matter of conspicuous consumption. Where pioneering man needed a sharpshooter wife, plantation man needed a wife who was a mere trifle and a showpiece.
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