Our Indispensable Matriarchs

Tenniel's Queen of Hearts

Tenniel’s Queen of Hearts

In the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up in Sewanee, Tennessee, home of the University of the South, I was always struck by the town matriarchs. Although all of the administrators, all of the students, and almost all of the professors were men, women seemed to run the town. (Sewanee may be the only college that owns its town.) The indomitable Mrs. Myers was a force of nature, two of the four doctors were women, and the aged Daughters of the Confederacy made their presence known.

Now that I’m back in Sewanee for my sabbatical, the elderly women still seem to cast a large shadow. I include my mother, who has been faithfully serving the community since 1954 and who, even though she is about to turn 90, heads the Sewanee Women’s Club. That’s why I was struck by a passage from a 1970 May Sarton novel that my wife is currently reading.

Kinds of Love is set in a small town in New Hampshire. The story revolves around two elderly women, an old Bostonian and a farmer’s daughter. In the following passage, Old Pete watches the women as they return from a hike and reflects on the power they exude:

They had been gone about an hour, Pete reckoned, but they did not look like gazelles now. Old Pete, who had his own aches and pains to contend with, looked shrewdly at Christina’s limp. But to his admiring eyes the tall woman still held herself like a queen. It’s the way she holds her head, he said to himself—as if nothing on earth could get her down. And Old Pete, his feet bound up in rags inside his boots, his old jacket more like the skin of an animal than a piece of clothing, enjoyed the sight of good clothes on a woman. Christina’s flame-colored suede jacket and gray skirt, the white chiffon scarf round her throat, looked just right to him.

Beside her, Ellen all in brown, looked like a frail autumn leaf, but of the two he reckoned Ellen might last the longer. She was nothing but a wiry little engine now, no flesh to wear away—well the village would be a different place when those two went, they and maybe four or five more. Miss Tuttle—he had not seen her for years out with her basket and trowel, botanizing. She was ninety, and no one saw her often any more. But Ed, the road agent, had told Old Pete not so long ago that he had seen her sitting out on the porch only the other day. When these three women died, the village would lose some quality, some configuration it had had for fifty years. But Pet’s long quiet pause on the stone wall had not led his wandering mind to any great conclusions about why the village had been dominated by womenfolk. Maybe that’s just the way things are, he thought. Maybe the Lord made them stronger in spirit and gave men the wits.

“Eh, Flicker?”

Flicker pricked his ears.

“As far as I can see, women don’t invent things. They just hold together and keep going what men have invented.”

Two Sewanee stalwarts have died in the past two months and Sewanee’s configuration is changing. That’s in part because there is no longer the old division of labor, with wives no longer devoting themselves to holding the community together while their husbands teach. For some reason, they insist upon having careers of their own.

I regard this as a healthy development. Still, something has been lost.

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