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The Sorry Truths Behind ‘The Myth of the Southern Mama’
A Pulitzer winner says the South ‘is awful to mothers’ — and he’s right
Southerners sentimentalize their mothers more fiercely than residents of any of the several American regions I’ve lived in. Books, movies, country music songs — all reflect romantic stereotypes that do the mamas no favors. An apt description of one of the most popular images came from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist John Archibald in Alabama, where I live:
“The books keep talking about a Southern mama that is revered and tough and proper, one who mixes perfectly seasoned grits with the wisdom of the ages, who reminds you to send a Thank You note and has no call to wait until Daddy gets home to show you the difference between right and wrong.”
You meet mothers that like in the Deep South, just as you also meet superannuated belles and sorority girls. The problem is that those images — while they often contain some truth — tell only part of their story.
It’s an injustice to reduce Southern mothers to brave women who inevitably triumph over injustices. Some of them — like the deracinated belle Amanda Wingfield, marooned in St. Louis, in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie — don’t triumph. They face injustices they shouldn’t have to triumph over.
