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1356 An American Dilemma
compensated, the revolting suspicion in the male that he might be slipping into bestiality
got rid of, by glorifying her; the Yankee must be answered by proclaiming from the
housetops that Southern Virtue, so far from being inferior, was superior, not alone to
the North’s but to any on earth, and adducing Southern Womanhood in proof.” {Ibid.y
p. 86.)
After the War this led to “the Southern rape complex.” pp. 116 ff.) Every
attempt to rise socially on the part of the Negro became an insult to the white woman:
‘What Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part
of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman.
What they saw, more or less consciously, in the conditions of Reconstruction was a
passage toward a condition for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself. And a
condition, moreover, which, logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as being as
absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the term ‘rape’
stood as truly as for the de facto deed.” (Ibid.y p. 1 16.)
. . the increased centrality of woman, added up with the fact that miscegenation,
though more terrifying than it had been even in the Old South, showed little tendency
to fall off despite efforts to build up standards against it, served to intensify the old
interest in gyneolatry, and to produce yet more florid notions about Southern Woman-
hood and Southern Virtue, and so to foster yet more precious notions of modesty and
decorous behavior for the Southern female to live up to.” {Ibid.y p. 128.)
The “woman on the pedestal” pattern is found outside the American South, of
course. It is a general trait In Western civilization and had extreme expression among the
feudal nobility of the Middle Ages and the court nobility of France after Louis XIV,
It was given added impetus by the loss of the economic function of middle class women
at the end of the 1 8th century. But nowhere did it appear in such extreme, sentimental,
and humorless form and so far down in the social status scale as in the American South.
(For a general description of the Romantic “pure woman” ideology, see Ernest W.
Burgess, “The Romantic Impulse and Family Disorganization,” The Survey [Decem-
ber I, 1926], pp. 290-294.)
All the moral conflicts involved in preserving the institution of color caste in a
democracy, but quite particularly the association of the caste theory with sex and social
status, explain the fear complex upon which most investigators of the race problem in
the South have commented. Thomas P. Bailey was early outspoken on this point:
“But the .worst has not been told. The veriest slavery of the spirit is to be found in
the deep-seated anxiety of the South. Southerners are afraid for the safety of their
wives and daughters and sisters; Southern parents are afraid for the purity of their
boys; Southern publicists are afraid that a time will come when large numbers of
negroes will try to vote, and thus precipitate race war. Southern religionists are afraid
that our youth will grow up to despise large numbers of their fellow-men. Southern
business men are afraid that agitation of the negro question will interfere with business
or demoralize the labor market. Southern officials are afraid of race riots, lynchings,
savage atrocities, paying not only for negro fiendishness but also for the anxiety caused
by fear of what might be.” (Of. cit.y pp. 346-347.)
Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1853; first printed
in Fraser^s Magazine [December, 1849]), p. 28.
• ^5
Quite ordinarily this attitude is directly associated with cherished memories from
•lavery. The pattern was set early after the Civil War. Again Henry W, Grady can b«
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