had a young child by then (Katherine, born in 1913) and replied as any new mother might: “Now Miss B. I got a baby to take care of.” Bennett’s curt reply: “A nigger can do that.”3
It may be historical presentism to find such matter-of-fact use of the word nigger to be jarring, but that use provides an ironic window into the dichotomous mind of someone who considered herself a champion of black people. Belle Bennett was involved throughout her life with organizations that benefited African Americans. She started “Bethlehem Houses” (community houses for African Americans), organized a “Colored Chautauqua,” taught Bible school to black children, and urged various women’s organizations to take up responsibility for what she called “this great race of people.” Yet the word fell from her lips as easily as a leaf from a tree. The term was acceptable among whites in the South in reference to black people and was still used freely in speech and print, though white women of Bennett and French’s class may have viewed it as too common to employ in polite company. But it is not just the use of the word. Bennett’s pronouncement that a black woman could tend her baby so that French could do other, more important things highlights the constraints within which African Americans lived then and would live for the next half century, in part because people like Bennett continued to reinforce them unthinkingly. Bennett’s well-meaning but Kiplingesque view of white people’s responsibility toward black people is comfortably housed in an unspoken and assumed superiority of race and class. That view is unmasked by the use of the word nigger, by the assumption that the coarse and demeaning term would be accepted, by the unthinking invocation of a demeaning black societal role, and by the urging of French to capitalize on it. Bennett knew that French would not judge her poorly. And French did not. In fact, she continued to admire her greatly. And she took the job.4
In this rather inglorious and ugly way, French became dean of the Sue Bennett School. She served only a year but quickly became enamored of the school and its Methodist-inspired mission. She later wrote a history of the Sue Bennett School and Brevard College in the booklet The Story of the Years in Mountain Work, in which she extolled the virtues of Sue Bennett the woman, her sister Belle (the caretaker of the school), and the role of Divine Providence in the founding and keeping of the school. The Jackson family had such a good continuing relationship with the school, in fact, that the school piano later wound up in the living room of Katherine’s oldest sister, Lou Eberlein.5
In 1916, French addressed the Council of Missionary Workers of the Women of the Methodist Church in Georgia. The visit is cited in a newspaper article that also references her ballad work and concludes that she is thus “well-qualified to speak of the life, manners and possibilities of the Appalachian mountain people.”6 That same year, William Franklin French unearthed a promising opportunity: to become the head of a new car company called Bour-Davis. This necessitated a move, first to Detroit, then to Shreveport, Louisiana. French, the dutiful wife, hung up the academic robes and went with her husband. In truth, she might have resigned anyway as she had given up on her ballad project with Berea and was pregnant again. She was also older—forty-one, a risky age for a second motherhood at that time. While in Detroit, she miscarried, losing her second child, a son. The miscarriage rendered her incapable of bearing more children.7
The move to Shreveport in 1917 marked the start of the most professionally satisfying period of French’s life. The Frenches settled into a house on Jordan Street. They found old music manuscripts in the attic, which they kept; apparently French intended to keep up with her own music making. After a short period for settling in, she engaged in what was to be her longest-lasting project: the formation of the Shreveport Woman’s Department Club.8
The Woman’s Department Club of Shreveport
As previously noted, many southern women graduated from northern colleges and after returning home forged new roles for women there. Women’s clubs were a vital avenue for this endeavor in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. They were ways in which women could gather in a socially acceptable environment, share meaningful and educational experiences, and engage in efforts addressing social issues like slavery, suffrage, and temperance. While women could not yet vote, their visibility and moral influence had an impact on men’s decisions. Thus, they walked the tightrope between acceptable female roles and social activism.
White women had been banding together for various causes since the American Revolution, when thirty-seven upper-class women, led by Esther Deberdt Reed, formed the Philadelphia Ladies’ Association to raise money for the revolutionary army. Their subscription efforts included seeking donations from not only from wealthy women but also from middle- and lower-class women, intentionally bridging the class divide by including women below their class standing in their fundraising efforts. Their door-to-door solicitations were tolerated because they were acting in support of their husbands’ endeavors. In fact, they raised over $300,000 (in Continental currency) from fourteen hundred donors.9
The women’s club movement proper began in about 1830 in the North. Free black women were among the first to organize, concerning themselves with “mutual aid and self-organization.” White female societies and relief societies also formed during those years to address problems the government did not seem inclined to address, including issues concerning widows, orphans (including black orphans), and the mentally ill. Women were permitted to take part in such efforts because the matters they were working with were seen as ones of nurture, extensions of the life of the home.10
During the Civil War, women organized on both sides to help with nursing and rehabilitation of the injured. These efforts were not just accepted but welcomed, and the temporary autonomy that they provided women was tolerated. It is after the war that some of the efforts of organized women became controversial. For one thing, the infantilization of women, particularly in the South, gave white men an excuse to engage in acts of horrific violence against black men in retaliation for supposed acts of sexual depravity against innocent and helpless white women. For another, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, women’s organizations began to engage with social issues. Women’s clubs were not seen as threatening until they began questioning matters like slavery and suffrage. As long as they built schools, medical dispensaries, and shelters for the homeless, they were considered to be operating within acceptable limits. Even temperance was seen as an acceptable issue, for it was framed in terms of the home, that is, the suffering caused by alcoholic husbands. However, as Anne Firor Scott points out, once these clubs supported prison reform, sex education, minimum wage laws, and suffrage, opprobrium came down on their heads, and they were accused of trying to revolutionize the social system, subverting the relations of women and men, and threatening the sacred institution of marriage.11
Women’s clubs in the South had a later start but followed roughly the same trajectory as their northern counterparts. Barbara Smith Corrales notes that it took at least a generation for them to catch on in the South: “The role of women’s organizations was initially less significant in patriarchal southern communities that severely restricted public expression by women, but, over time, southern women’s clubs effectively loosened social restraints, permitting a broader application of the feminine gender’s ‘natural traits’ (nursing, nurturing, and moral guidance). Women utilized this new freedom to promote reforms, eventually including woman suffrage.”12
However, not all women’s clubs, North or South, promoted progressive policies and goals. In the South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, used Lost Cause mythology and sentiment to promote a kinder, gentler story about the antebellum South. Chapters erected statues, established Confederate veterans’ homes, and, most importantly, in the early twentieth century used pressure from their twenty thousand members to urge textbook companies to put a pro-Confederate spin on “the War between the States.” This pleasant fiction promoted an emphasis on the states’ rights angle and painted a picture of kindly, elegant, dashing masters who loved their slaves and treated them well. It was an image that was to persist throughout the South for at least half a century and echoes
