SOURCE: Scott, Anne Firor. “Discontent.” In The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930, pp. 46-79. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970.

In the following essay, Scott documents the dissatisfaction of many Southern women with the restrictive roles assigned to them in the Old South.

Open complaint about their lot was not the custom among southern ladies; yet their contented acceptance of the home as the “sphere to which God had appointed them” was sometimes more apparent than real. Most southern women would not have tried, or known how, to free themselves from the system which was supposed to be divinely ordained, but there is considerable evidence that many of them found the “sphere” very confining.

Women's expressions of unhappiness centered in two principal areas of life. One was their relationship to slaves. This complex web encompassed marriage, family life, and sexual mores as these were defined by the...