Charis and Agnes Scott College welcome Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd in conversation with Mary Cain for a discussion of Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South. Southern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism. This event is in partnership with the Agnes Scott College Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies.

In a trio of popular gender rituals--sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage--young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to "do" white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?

Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties' racial work or their investment in it.

With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion--stylized and predictable but ephemeral--has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd is an independent scholar who lives and writes in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Mary Cain is Associate Professor of History at Agnes Scott College. She is the author of several articles and reviews that consider issues of race, gender, privilege, power and domesticity in the antebellum United States. Her teaching interests include African-American history, the history of slavery, Native American history and US women’s history. In recent years she has received both the Faith Yao Yu Chao Faculty Excellence Award and the Vulcan Materials Company Teaching Excellence Award. In January she was appointed editor of the teaching network within H-Net, the online platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and looks forward to serving the academic community in that role!

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Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South--Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd in conversation with Mary Cain