Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting The South

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Response to Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South In her book Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South Anne Loveland attempts to address a gap in the historical scholarship of the author and civil rights activist Lillian Smith. In her opinion, scholars of southern intellectual and cultural history often "focus on her work in the civil rights movement and neglect her literary effort." Loveland argues that by dismissing Smith as a writer, the thing she wished to be remembered most for, these historians have boxed Smith into the very stereotype that she tried to combat: "the nice little lady who did so much to help Negroes." According to Loveland, this error also fails to address the ways in which Smith reconciled the political …show more content…

While recognizing that Smith's closest friends were all women, and that the greatest encouragement and appreciation Smith’s work received came from women, Loveland devalues the significance of that support by implying that those female friends praised Smith's work only because they "recognized how much Lillian desired approval and praise."8 Loveland concludes the chapter on relationships: "She seemed to expect ill treatment from people, especially men, and purposely looked for indications of it to confirm her suspicions. At least some of the frustration and disappointment marking her life and career was of her own making and the result of an inability to take satisfaction in anything less than unconditional praise or loyalty."9 I may be a bit naïve but I feel like a biographer shouldn’t be that antagonistic towards her subject. Not to say that every biographer should be head over heels for their subject, but at least have somewhat neutral feelings towards them. Loveland makes Smith’s expectation of ill treatment from men seem petty and childish, and credits Smith’s frustrations to the temper tantrums she would throw when she did not receive unconditional praise. I believe that Smith’s expectation of ill treatment was the conditioned response of woman who had spent almost her entire life in the sexist and male dominated South. Loveland’s biography seems to discount Smith’s experience with discrimination and an oppressive patriarchy, and portrays her as a self-absorbed and contemptuous

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