Virginia Lee

March is Women's History Month in these United States. It's a good month for women to be honored and remembered because winter ends in March and spring begins. And yes, that's stating the obvious. Think about it. The theme for this year's Women History Month, or Herstory if you prefer, is Sustaining the American Spirit. Dating back to Virginia Dare's birth in the 16th century, America has found sustenance through magnificent women, most of whom will never be written about or remarked upon because they are mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, teachers, caregivers, or the neighbor lady down the street who makes the best homemade fudge.

I've been blessed with a variety of magnificent women in my own family. My mother not only gave me life, nurtured and helped me to become a magnificent woman in my own right, but hundreds of other children benefited during her career as a speech pathologist. Children were lovingly and patiently taught how to speak, listen, and interact with others better via their new communication skills. My mother affected lives far beyond her own family. And she was just doing her job.

My maternal grandmother was a supreme nurturer, which is amazing, given her own history. Grandmere, as I think of her, was a wee child when her own mother died. She and her brother were put into a Church of Christ orphanage by their own grandfather, who kidnapped them from their grieving father, my great-grandfather. He never gave up searching for his children and did find them shortly before his death. Even more miraculous, however, was that my grandmere learned to be a loving, nurturing woman of great strength who raised three daughters and one son and a goodly number of her own grandchildren for many years. She sustained her family. My family.

Of course, my maternal grandfather's family has some incredible women in it too that I consider to be prime examples of women who sustain the American spirit. My great-aunt Florence was one such person.

Aunt Flo was a pistol-smart,funny and wicked in all the most delicious ways. I can't recall how many husbands she had over the years, but she and the elders in the family only ever admitted to two. She never had children but she impacted on the lives of her nieces and nephews and their children over the years. Aunt Flo was a "Hello Girl" for the Telephone Company back in the early days of telephones. This was somewhat shocking to her proper Southern family but she did it anyway. As an "Hello Girl" she traveled from town to town as they got their phone systems set up. She acted as operator for the towns until she could get a local person trained for the job and then she'd move on to the next town. She stayed in respectable rooming houses or women's hotels, but because she was an unmarried woman on her own she was easy prey for local gossips. "Hello Girls" had very strict moral codes they had to abide by back then so Aunt Flo pretty much behaved herself. Well, so far as I've been able to discern anyway.

Another aunt, this one more pious, Juanita worked for the Army during WWII as an Information Officer for her region and it was then that she learned to fly a plane and do aerial photography. She apparently flew and wrote about the war effort and kept tabs on the Army Corps of Engineers' Mississippi River projects. My mother and I never knew Juanita could fly until the day of her funeral. Another thing we didn't know was that she was an oft-published Christian poet.

I've also been gifted with fine women teachers throughout my life. My two most influential teachers prior to college were Mrs. Sechriest and Miss Simon. Mrs. Sechriest taught fifth grade for years and years back home in North Carolina. She came late to teaching, having opted to raise her own daughters first, but once she began to teach she embraced it wholeheartedly and changed the lives of her pupils forever.

Mrs. Sechriest is the teacher who taught me about the world as a community. Our units on anthropology, archaeology, ethics, the arts and more showed my ten-year-old self that there was much beyond our small city and state. I learned about Gandhi and Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh and B. F. Skinner while in her class. Jung and Freud and Martin Luther King and the Bronte family entered my consciousness for the first time. And we had fun! She opened our minds and yet never let us forego our childhoods. To this day I can close my eyes and hear her refined Southern drawl as she read Mrs. Pigglewiggle's adventures aloud.

Five years after Mrs. Sechriest, I landed in an American Literature class taught by a menopausal spinster lady who had instructed two of my three siblings before me. Miss Simon thought my gifted older sister, Ruth, hung the moon. The woman seldom got my name right. There was no way I could come close to the standard of Ruth. My response to Miss Simon, therefore, was disdain. She'd stand by my desk screaming my sister's name, inches away from my face and I'd pretend she was speaking Japanese. But, through Miss Simon I learned to maintain my personhood, no matter what Miss Simon, via her tirades and seeming disregard for my personal identity, instilled in me the importance of my sense of self. As the youngest child in a brilliant family this lesson was one I value highly. She also taught me how to write in classic essay format, a skill I have passed on to many young people over the years. Miss Simon's essay form has never failed me even if she never knew my name.

Miss Simon, in her American Literature and Literary Analysis classes during high school, also exposed me to several women writers who changed my whole perspective on writing, reading, and who I was (and am) as a Southerner. Writers can be like that. Some writers you read and BAM! They impact you instantly and permanently. Others sneak up on you. You read their work and shrug a bit and think, "what does this have to do with me?" Then, when you least expect it, those same writers' words or ideas come back to you, sustaining you.

Miss Eudora Welty is one such writer. Welty altered me. Upon reading Why I Live at the P.O., Delta Wedding, and The Ponder Heart, my worldview changed. Suddenly it was okay to be a Southerner because I clearly was not alone. I grew up in a progressive university town in North Carolina and rarely spoke with a Southern accent or of being a Southerner because most of my peers were not from the South. Welty's stories freed me from my constraints because they gloried in not just the humanity of the characters but also their Southernhood. Even though my life experiences were very different than those of Welty's characters, I recognized the truth in her people. They went to my daddy's church or shopped in the farmer's market down the road from my house or rode the buses in Memphis when I visited my grandmother during the summer. I learned it was GOOD to be Southern and that in truth Southerners were really no different from anyone else. Miss Welty sustains me to this day with her wisdom and humor and fine writing.

Another Southern woman writer who sustains me is Flannery O'Connor. She had a highly developed sense of comedy, faith and great intelligence. Thomas Merton, a huge fan of hers, said he would not compare her to Hemingway, Porter or Sartre, but rather with "..someone like Sophocles." Her classic tale, A Good Man is Hard to Find is not only quintessentially Southern but also American. The children, the grandmother, and all the characters are people we know personally or have observed. But the crooked paths in O'Connor's stories take us further and deeper, into original and highly disturbing revelations. She is a national treasure.

Lillian Hellman also wrote darkly of the South and her people. In her play The Little Foxes, Regina is the perfect Southern Lady. Why? Because to the non-familial observer she is the essence of grace and politeness while in reality she wields an iron fist where her family is concerned. True Southern Ladies can go anywhere and do anything. They are literate, pious, skilled in things relating to the home, practical, and they put their family first, even to the point of controlling them unrelentingly as Regina does with hers. Of course, not all Southern women are Regina-like, nor do they want to be, but the one truth about Southern families that Hellman instills in us via Regina is that most families have and even need at least one very strong woman.

Zora Neale Hurston entered my sphere of awareness when I returned to college at the age of thirty-two. Assigned Jonah's Gourd Vine during my first semester at the University of Mississippi, I found that I'd been missing something wonderful. As a determined reader of Southern writers for nearly two decades I had somehow managed to stay ignorant of this writer's contribution to American Literature and Cultural Studies. I was doubly chagrinned by my unawareness because of my having spent a semester attending and doing theatre at North Carolina Central University in the mid-80s. Hurston had spent 1939-1940 at NCCU and I somehow never computed this fact until a decade after I left North Carolina. At the U of MS I greedily read everything I could by and about Hurston. I reveled in her folk wisdom and portraits of the South's inhabitants and rejoiced in the glory of her stories. I also grieved, however. I deplored this gap in my education and for a while was even angered by it. Finally I accepted that my teachers like Miss Simon were more than likely unaware of Hurston due to their ages and racially divided educations. This absence of knowledge still saddens me for them for I feel they would have benefited and found sustenance by reading Hurston's words.

Rita Dove is another writer I didn't know about until my return to college. During my second term at the U of MS, however, I had to teach one class period on an American writer and I opted for Rita Dove because, um, she had a pretty name. How can I have not known about this poet? Chagrinned once again at my backwardness, I dived into research for my presentation. The joy Dove's poetry gave, and still gives, me set my senses reeling. The deceptive simplicity of her words and the clarity of her imagery excited my brain and my soul. I had found yet another American writer to inspire and sustain me with her literary gifts.

Women have made contributions in every field imaginable. I will leave it to other essayists to recount the remarkable women of science, art, religion, music, politics and hundreds of other arenas. Reading good writing, however, can truly buoy our hearts, minds and souls. We are fortunate in America to have multitudes of women writers to inspire us, challenge us, and even bind us together as a people. I've touched on a few Southern women writers because they provide me personally with great spiritual nourishment. These writing women, like the women in my family and my teachers, inspire me to aspire. During this Women's History Month, take some time to reflect on the women who have affected and perhaps still affect your life. Rejoice in the gifts they bestow upon you and if they are alive, thank them. Our American Spirit has been challenged these last few months and it is more important than ever to acknowledge those women who lift us out of the mundane. Tell them and show them their importance. Even if they are no longer with you, do it for yourself. Allow your spirit to embrace their sustenance. And most of all, be glad for it.

Recommended Reading:

Eudora Welty
A Curtain of Green, 1941
The Robber Bridegroom, 1942
The Wide Net, 1943
Delta Wedding, 1946
The Golden Apples, 1949 - My favorite.
The Ponder Heart, 1954
The Bride of Innesfallen, 1955
Losing Battles, 1970
One Time, One Place, 1971
The Optimist's Daughter, 1972
The Eye of the Story, 1978 - Criticism and commentaries on the craft of writing.
The Collected Stories of EW, 1980
One Writer's Beginnings, 1983 - Autobiography. HIGHLY recommended.

Zora Neale Hurston

Fiction

Jonah's Gourd Vine: A Novel, 1934
Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937
Seraph on the Suwanee: A Novel, 1948

Non-fiction

Mules and Men, 1935
Tell My Horse, 1938
Dust Tracks on the Road, 1942 - Autobiography.

Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Short Stories, 1971
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, 1955
Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965
Wise Blood, 1952

Lillian Hellman
The Children's Hour, 1934 - Delicious!
The Little Foxes, 1939 - A true classic.
Watch on the Rhine, 1941
Another Part of the Forest, 1947
The Autumn Garden, 1951
Toys in the Attic, 1960

Rita Dove

The Yellow House on the Corner, 1980
Museum, 1983
Thomas and Beulah, 1986
Mother Love, 1995

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH - 2002 Sustaining The American Spirit

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WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH - 2002
Sustaining The American Spirit