Gone with the Wind

On occasion, I talk about Gone with the Wind. Two points -- I didn't realize Scarlet O'Hara was going to Fayetteville Female Academy. (Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 4.  The Gone with the Wind movie doesn't have Scarlet's schooling.) The Fayetteville Academy is Mitchell's fictional academy of Scarlet's schooling. The actual Fayetteville Academy is both boys and girls. I realized that female and male academies were allowed in the pre-Civil War South, but rare.

Second, William Faulker was surprised that the United Daughters of the Confederacy was going to be upset that the Gone with the Wind was too Northern!

[E]pilogue and epitaph, because apparently neither the U.D.C. ladies who instigated and bought the monument, nor the architect who designed it nor the masons who erected it had noticed that the marble eyes under the shading marble palm stared not toward the north and the enemy, but toward the south, toward (if anything) his own rear -- looking perhaps, the wits said (could say now, with the old war thirty-five years past and you could even joke about it -- except the women, the ladies, the unsurrendered, the irreconcilable, who even after another thirty-five years would still get up and stalk out of picture houses showing Gone with the Wind), for reinforcements; or perhaps not a combat soldier at all, but a provost marshal's man looking for deserters, or perhaps himself for a safe place to run to: because that old war was dead; the sons of those tottering old men in gray had already died in blue coats in Cuba, the macabre mementos and testimonials and shrines of the new war already usurping the earth ....

Comments

[LawProf John Banzhaf]

It’s interesting to learn that “female and male academies were allowed in the pre-Civil War South,” especially since, even into the late 1980s, both the Virginia Military Institute [VMI] in Lexington, Virginia, and The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, discriminated on the basis of sex in refusing to admit females as cadets.

I helped put an end to this by filing a formal legal complaint against The Citadel. See, e.g.

BIAS CHARGE AGAINST ACADEMY SPURS PROBE
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1989/07/23/bias-charge-against-academy-spurs-probe/

“John Banzhaf III, a professor of law and legal activism at the National Law Center at George Washington University, has filed a sex-discrimination complaint with the Justice Department and the House subcommittee against The Citadel, claiming the all-male bastion should admit women to its program because it receives state and federal support. . . .
Banzhaf, in the complaint filed with the House panel, contends that the federal government would never think of supporting any program where blacks or Jews are excluded.
'Why then at The Citadel, where the discrimination is based on sex rather than race or religion?” the complaint asks.”

Although the practice was finally put to bed by a decision involving VMI - United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996) - the first female admitted to either of these two schools proudly and openly practicing sex discrimination was allowed into the entering class at The Citadel.

When both schools finally surrendered, an interesting additional issue arose. Although The Citadel and the major military academies used different standards of physical fitness for males and females, VMI required that all cadets meet the tougher standards traditionally applied to its male cadets.

[Al Brophy]

At least secondary schools. Rare.