Word: northern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That is a historical irony. Before the rise of Protestant liberalism in the 19th century, when scholars began to question such keystone doctrines as the deity of Jesus and his resurrection, U.S. Protestantism was generally evangelical. Then came the Civil War and in its wake, the growth of Northern cities and the drift of Northern Protestantism into a more liberal camp...
These women and many others point up one of the South's many paradoxes: the Southern woman, long limned in a moonlight-and-magnolia image, is emerging as rapidly as her Northern sister, perhaps faster. But she feels the tug of a centuries-old code of Southern femininity: Be a lady. Be the moral conscience of the family. Let your husband protect you from the baser things of life. Do not challenge or compete with men. Be nice to everyone, regardless of your actual feelings...
...adds, "I was a C- student. Smart girls weren't supposed to get boy friends." Says Messer, "Psychiatrists see Southern women because of their rage and resentment at having to bury their feelings. Northern women tend to be treated by psychiatrists more for depression and paranoia. There is much more hysteria in Southern patients." But, Messer notes, change is in the air: fewer Southern women are hiding anger and frustration behind the image of the happy gentlewoman...
Pauline Glance, a Georgia State University psychologist, thinks that the tradition of being both gentle and strong gives Southern women some advantage over their Northern sisters, who more commonly feel that the two qualities conflict. "Women in both the North and South are struggling with problems of their feelings about themselves," she says. "I think Southern women will find them easier to solve...
...North was the exporter, the South the importer and consumer of ideas, styles, literature and fashions. Southerners compliantly pursued Yankee values, imitated Yankee models and tried to believe in Progress. They even ruthlessly suppressed Southern Populism, a movement that offered the only radical critique of corporate capitalism and dominant Northern values then viable in America. But Southerners were never converted into authentic Yankees; they proved to be dutiful consumers but poor imitators...