Dixie Skirt Wars
By: Beverly Garside
Tags: Feminism, Women, Parenting, Racism, Social Justice

Dixie Skirt Wars

How Southern White Women Oppress Each Other

Photo by Photographe EVJF GREG on Unsplash

Something Going On

My family moved to rural Southern Virginia when I was 12. Coming off a military circuit — the Midwest, the West Coast, the Southwest, and Southeast Asia — it was my first time in a rural area. Now that my father was retired, it was supposed to be something I had never had before — a permanent home community.

But it wasn’t to be. For while my parents had roots in the South, I did not. I didn’t fit in. I had no close friends. At 17 I made my first step out, to college in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. After that I returned to what I thought might feel more like home — the military.

Both of these refuges shared a common anomaly. They were almost completely devoid of white women from the rural South.

In my university there was a rational explanation for this. The vast majority of students came from the wealthy Northern Virginia suburbs or the Norfolk naval community. My high school, however, like so many others in the south, focused on vocational education. Only a tiny handful of us even planned to go to college.

The Air Force should have been different. The military thrives on rural recruits who lack opportunities in their home communities. The women’s barracks were full of black, Latina, and Asian women from everywhere, including rural southern areas like my own. And there were white women from every region except one — the historically Antebellum South.

In my entire four-year enlistment, which included four bases on two continents, I could count on one hand the number of white women from the South that I encountered.

Something was going on with southern white women, and it took me a long time to figure out what it was.

Skirt Wars

It was the 1970s. We had Roe vs. Wade, Women’s Liberation, and the Sexual Revolution. Jesus was coming back and boy was he pissed. And we knew exactly who was pissing him off — us girls.

I remember it in vignettes of venom dripping from pursed lips. Adult women spewed bile and judgement upon us. We heard it from our teachers and Sunday school teachers, our neighbors, and our aunts.

Jesus was coming to get us. Because we were driving around town unsupervised. We were going out on dates and riding around in cars with boys. And worse of all, we were wearing those skirts.

I encountered the skirt war in the heart of its operational headquarters — church. Our church had started having the kids’ Sunday school classes pass the collection plates down the pews. It was a chore I didn’t relish, but it turned out that our duties were short-lived.

Apparently, some of the ladies of the church complained that we were prancing down the aisles in those short skirts, and the men were looking at our legs. My parents, who were not particularly religious, found the whole episode amusing. I was just relieved to be done with it.

But I also learned something. These adult women felt threatened by us. They thought we were after their husbands. That seemed silly to me. It also seemed like it wasn’t the whole story.

As an adult, I know that skirt wars are common fare for school-age girls everywhere, and that the South has no monopoly on age resenting youth. As I look back, however, I saw something more in those pursed, disdainful lips. It was fear, and not just about their husbands’ wandering eyes.

It was like we were on the cusp of some kind of escape, of breaking a boundary that had been forbidden to them.

We were getting out of their control. Jesus better come back soon, because something had to keep us on a tight leash.

Boogeyman

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

“But weren’t you afraid?”

The question came from a reporter on my high school newspaper. My recent tourist visit to Germany and Switzerland with my mother and grandmother had made me newsworthy. This question, however, flummoxed me. What was she talking about? Afraid of what? I managed some clueless reply about never having been on an airplane that crashed.

After that I started to notice just how much the white girls in my school talked about being afraid. There were stories about being left unexpectedly alone in their homes at night and being freaked out about every noise. There were complaints about not being able to go somewhere because no one was available to go with them.

But why did that prevent them from going?

When I would mention having gone out of town with my mother and sister, I would get a shocked reaction. “You went all by yourselves?” Apparently, white women going out alone was just not done, especially after dark. It required a male escort — a father, brother, boyfriend, or date. Though when a male was not available another woman would sometimes do.

“Are you up to a trip to the ladies room?”

The first time a girl asked me that I assumed she wanted to tell me something in private. But no, she just went right in the stall. And when my rising from restaurant booths or theater seats would prompt other girls’ offers to accompany me, I first assumed they had to go too. Sometimes they did, but sometimes they would just hang out by the sinks, like some kind of security force.

As an adult coming back for visits, I have faced incredulous and scandalized reactions. “You drove down all by yourself!” Distance seems to amplify the consternation even further, as when my sister-in-law flew “all the way down from Alaska by herself?” Indeed, the first question on many women’s minds upon seeing me back is an inordinate preoccupation with my travel arrangements. How did I get here? Who came with me? What? No one?

To this day I can still get that dreaded question ending with “all by yourself?”

Armed with some history lessons and a curious mind, I finally got an inkling about what had these southern white women so terrified. Memories of certain events and conversations confirmed it.

They were afraid of black men. It went all the way back to slavery. Unchained black men were assumed to be constantly on the prowl for white women.

On the surface this seemed preposterous. After all, half of my high school student body was black, along with some teachers and staff. Most kids were very poor, but our schools were friendly and respectful places. I don’t remember any fear there at all.

And I never heard any of the black girls mention such irrational terrors. My travels didn’t scandalize them.

But outside of school white girls’ fear seems to be ever-present. It goes way beyond a normal wariness towards strange men. It’s something pathological and paralyzing. In the back of these girls’ minds the historic myth about predatory black slaves seems to have expanded into some kind of amorphous boogeyman. It’s an invisible, ubiquitous monster, lurking around back doors, hiding in ladies rooms, and stalking any white woman venturing off too far by herself.

The message is clear, passed down from white mother to white daughter for generations. “You are never safe. You must stay close to home. Don’t go off on your own. Stay on your leash.”

Mama

Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash

Mothers figure larger in southern families than in many other parts of the country. The southern proverb “If Mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy” is humorously true.

But it can have a dark side.

So many mothers I have either known or heard about in Southern Virginia impress me as puppet masters. If a woman has a son, she has a treasure, though one day he will grow up and make his own life. If she has a daughter, however, she has a personal servant for life. A white daughter is tied to her mother’s fingers from her own cradle to her mother’s grave.

Daughter is expected to fulfill all of Mama’s demands. If Mama wants something, daughter must drop any previous plans and go do it. If Mama doesn’t approve of daughter’s relationship with someone, or participation in some group, she will time those demands to coincide with their plans.

Daughters never say “no” to Mama. And daughters never, ever leave Mama.

I have known southern men who had to give up rare, good-paying jobs because their wives would not leave Mama. I have known a marriage to break up because Mama insisted that daughter’s family be present for Sunday dinner, every Sunday, with no exceptions for vacations or visiting her husband’s family. And daughter would never say no.

What’s a daughter to do? Have a daughter of her own. Then she gets to be Mama.

A Toxic Legacy

Obviously, all white women in the South don’t hogtie their daughters with a racist terror of the boogeyman, crush them with a lifetime obligation of servitude, or threaten their budding maturity with judgement from god. A few other white girls from my high school did go away to college. Others undoubtedly cut their puppet strings and had the audacity to chart their own lives, whether this entailed staying in their home community or going away, even all by themselves.

But they are the exceptions.

Recent reevaluations of the legacy of slavery show some promise. And in the South, as everywhere else, even small cities are becoming centers of diversity, culture, and forward-looking energy. In the countryside, however, I’m not so sure.

My hope is that new generations of southern white girls will not only recognize their complicity in oppressing African Americans, but also in oppressing themselves and each other.

I would like to see the white women of the south unleashed to experience full autonomy as adults and human beings. For while the black experience is rightly front and center, this lesser-told chapter also deserves a place in history’s dustbin.