Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South

Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South is a work of nonfiction by Shirley Abbott, who was originally from Hot Springs (Garland County). It was published by Ticknor and Fields in 1983. When it was reissued by the University of Arkansas Press in 2017, it was described by the press as “both a personal memoir and a meditation on the often pernicious mythologies of southern cultural history.”

Shirley Jean Abbott Tomkievicz was the only child of Velma Loyd Abbott, who was a homemaker, and Alfred Bemont “Hat” Abbott, a bookmaker or “bookie” involved in illegal gambling. After leaving Arkansas for college, Shirley Abbott had a successful career in New York City as a writer, historian, and magazine editor. In 2008, she was named to the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame. She died in 2019.

Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South was well received by reviewers. Following that success, she wrote The Bookmaker’s Daughter in 1991. The Bookmaker’s Daughter concentrates on her father, while Womenfolks focuses on her mother’s side of the family.

As she would do again in The Bookmaker’s Daughter, she chose intriguing chapter titles to draw the reader in, including “Daughters of Time,” “Good Country People,” “Drowned Woman,” “The Servant Problem,” “That Old-Time Religion,” and “Why Southern Women Leave Home.”

The opening line of Womenfolks addresses Abbott’s main theme: “We all grow up with the weight of history on us.” Early in the book, she states that her view of the South is not at all like Gone with the Wind, although she says she read the Civil War–based novel “more times than a Baptist preacher reads the Ten Commandments.”

Her local references include being born and raised in Hot Springs, which she calls “a peaceable little resort town.” She also makes reference to relatives who live in rural Mountain Pine (Garland County). Abbott notes that, growing up among her people, “We were proud to be Southerners. Nobody knew why.”

Her relatives were “farm women, one or two generations from real pioneer days, with leathery skin from working outdoors.” Abbott says that the women she descended from did not represent the dainty image that some have of Southern womanhood. Her relatives and their friends “worked hard, had strong backs, and strong minds…[and] they didn’t know how to be Southern ladies or Southern belles, and wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel for any of it.”

However, even without a hoopskirt, Abbott was what she calls a properly brought-up Southern girl, spending a lot of time in cemeteries with her mother, aunts, and cousins in order to read the gravestones of ancestors and recite the names.

Some of her observations come with a comedic tone, such as: “To grow up female in the South is to inherit a set of directives that warp one for life, if they do not actually induce psychosis.” Those directives, according to Abbott, include being both frigid and passionate, preferably at the same time. She claims that the Southern women she knew also held what she considers an unspoken truth: “The secret was that they’re stronger than any man.”

Womenfolks was applauded by reviewers, including noted historian C. Vann Woodward, an Arkansan who was originally from Vanndale (Cross County). Woodward praised Womenfolks by stating, “The South of the backwoods hillbilly plain folks has at last found its true and inspired interpreter.” He called Abbott’s book a revisionist look at Southern history from a woman’s point of view.

Upon its reissue of Womenfolks in 2017, the University of Arkansas Press lauded Abbott’s depiction of “the gritty, independent women of the backwoods, the South’s true heroines, whose hardscrabble world is one of red dirt and hard work—a far cry from the hoopskirts and magnolias of southern lore.” The publisher called the book “as honest, vibrant, and remarkable” as the women we meet in its pages through its “vivid portrait of a rural culture beset by poverty and sustained by deeply rooted traditions.” A preface to the new edition notes that Abbott assesses what changed and what may never change about the South, “and expresses her hope that the better angels of our nature may prevail in our still-new century.”

For additional information:
Abbott, Shirley. The Bookmaker’s Daughter: A Memory Unbound. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991.

———. Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.

Dishongh, Kim. “Shirley Jean Abbott Tomkievicz.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 25, 2008. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2008/may/25/shirley-jean-abbott-tomkievicz-20080525/ (accessed November 20, 2024).

Nancy Hendricks
Garland County Historical Society