Word: gentlewoman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Amanda, an abandoned wife, struggles to maintain her dignity through the memories of her Southern gentlewoman past, especially her days on Blue Mountain, where she imagined herself to be the heartthrob of an abundance of "gentleman callers." Her main purpose in life is to see her children married and successful. In the process of achieving these goals she manages to alienate Tom completely and to cause Laura to withdraw even further into herself...
Streep is always entertaining to watch, even when, as here, she looks like a debutante holidaying among the homeless. Both she and Helen are, after all, Vassar girls, and she bears herself with the shambling dignity of a gentlewoman trying to maintain moral equilibrium while on the skids. But Streep's role is small. Nicholson must carry the film, and it is no fair burden. In one or two other films, this sexy, daredevil performer has renounced his star quality, tamped his radiance, sat on his capacious charm, as if this were a higher form of acting...
...writings of the period show that a classical education was considered improper for women for the same reason that a liberal education is often called impractical today. The skills of embroidering, beading, dancing and singing were prized in a gentlewoman; reading Greek and Latin was not. As the century wore on, the former qualities became more important to society women like Mrs. Pepys, wife of the English diarist Samuel Pepys. In the words of a contemporary, Lady Chudleigh, women were educated "as if for nothing else designed/But made like puppets, to divert mankind...
...land where their cattle grazed. The militants armed themselves with scythes and pitchforks, and on one occasion threatened to burn the houses, drown the servants and cut off the head of one of their oppressors, a certain Captain Thomas Lovell. "It was only the intervention of 'a gentlewoman' who happened to be passing," reports Lady Antonia, "which dissuaded the women from their violent course, otherwise they would have done the captain 'some great mischief...
Selma is a city of 29,500 people-14,400 whites, 15,100 Negroes. Its voting rolls are 99% white, 1% Negro. More than a city, Selma is a state of mind. "Selma," says a guidebook on Alabama, "is like an old-fashioned gentlewoman, proud and patrician, but never unfriendly." But the symbol of Selma is Sheriff James Clark, 43, a bullyboy segregationist who leads a club-swinging, mounted posse of deputy volunteers, many of them Ku Klux Klansmen. It was in Selma, four years ago, that the Federal Government filed its first voting-rights suit, but court processes...