Womenfolks : Growing Up Down South

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Summary: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South
Review: Any Southern woman who has ever been tempted to transmogrify her prolific, feisty, cow-milking, chicken-plucking, garden-producing grandmothers into delicate, helpless ladies of the manor should read this book first. For in it, Shirley Abbott looks straight in the faces of the proud, independent, and powerful female descendants of the Scots-Irish migration to the Southern states and discovers something far more admirable than the Southern Belle.

In the process, she challenges such old-line interpretations of southern experience as that of W.J. Cash, who claimed the poor Scots-Irish immigrants who stepped off crowded ships at Charleston and Philadelphia fled inland in search of land that would permit them to become part of the English-American slave-holding, plantation-owning power structure of the Southern colonies. Nothing could be farther from the truth, Abbott argues convincingly: their experience had instilled in the Scots-Irish an abiding hatred of all things English, including the political and economic institutions the English established in centers like Charleston. These new immigrants preferred the terrifying, unexplored baclwoods, where they were free of English domination and what they conceived to be English decadence. The pioneer experience, reinforced by continuing poverty, a civil war, and the depredations of a occupying army only reinforced the pride and self-confidence these people brought with them to America.

In a well conceived study driven by her desire to place and understand her own poor, white, rural, and proud forebears, Abbott produces an elegant combination of memoir and cultural history. Her crystalline two-page account of the Scots-Irish trail to America is in itself worth the price of the book. And the memorable descriptions of the homes, tables, and characters of her Arkansas kinspeople demonstrate the consequences of that migration. For anyone wishing to understand Southern culture and southern women in particular, this small volume is a must-read. It takes the reader beyond stereotypes to a realistic picture of people whose lives are far more inspiring than that of any Belle, Sweet Potato Queen, or YaYa. I have spent my lifetime in the South and in the study of its literature and culture. Yet, I came away from this book with a deeper undersanding of the region and my own personal history in it.

Rating:
Summary: This book helps me know myself and my family.
Review: I like to read this book once a year to remind me who I am and where I came from. I will never again be critical or ashamed of my rural mothers'and grandmothers' ways. I always feel like crying after I read this book--tears for their toil and for the disrespect society dealt them, but mostly, I cry a little for myself, too. I regret that I can't sit with them all around the table and hear their stories anymore, and I wish I could pile in the car like Shirley and her cousin to ride out to the cemetary to tend the graves. Abbott's story was familiar to me from the first page. I appreciate the opportunity to remember my maternal ancestors--the poor, white, uneducated, transient,hard working women of the south

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Summary: Part Memoir, Part History
Review: Shirley Abbott has truly captured the southern female experience, both past and present. Her vivid descriptions of her own family and her mother are the best parts of this book. The historical accounts of women from antebellum times to present are interesting, though not quite as engrossing as her own recollections. It is impossible not to regret the passing of an era in the south as one reads this book and realizes the complexities of women who were so often deemed simple hillbillies. Many women, like myself, who grew up in small southerns towns will recognize their own experiences as they follow the author's. I know I did. On occasion, Ms. Abbott wanders off into feminist interpretations that could get a little harsh. I didn't agree with all of her conclusions, but I really enjoyed reading this book.