Draft:Shirley Abbot

Shirley Jean Abbott Tomkievicz (November 16, 1934 – April 8, 2019) is an American writer of books describing the culture of the American south, including All Out of Faith. and Womenfolks

Life
Born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, her father was a bookmaker who took bets on illegal, off-track horse races, but was quixotically a well-respected member of the community.

"Abbott was the only child of Alfred B. “Hat” Abbott and Velma Loyd Abbott. A good student, she graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1952 and went on, with the help of scholarships, to Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University), where she majored in English and French. She graduated cum laude in 1956, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Grenoble in France in 1957–1958, and spent a year at the Columbia University Graduate School of French, again on scholarship."

Abbot took a job in New York City to escape the segregated South, which she found distasteful, and became a writer of magazine articles and books.

Tara McPherson writes:

White southerners frequently stress the importance of keeping up appearances; for example, in her Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, popular writer Shirley Abbot describes the "natural theatricality" inherent in southern hospitality. It requires "a talent for taking on a special role in a comedy of manners that will apparently run forever, no matter how transparent its characters and aims". This maintenance of an aura of tranquility despite a certain degree of transparency suggests that southern hospitality is a performance, a masquerade, an agreed-on social fiction, albeit a powerful one with material effects.

"...the paradoxical role of southern women to not only maintain their own submissiveness, but to pass it on to their daughters. this contradictory expectation is perhaps what Shirley Abbot refers to when she writes: "to grow up female in the South is to inherit a set of directives that warp one for life"."

"The best essay on the Southern Belle is in Shirley Abbot, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (N.Y., 1983)".

"Shirley Abbot addresses the Kingdom rule structure, specifically the Southern directives in her book Womenfolk: "The legacy passed from mother to daughter is everywhere ambivalent and complex, full of unconfessed wishes and unadmitted bequests, woven with demands and admonitions, some of which contradict the rest"."

"Probing deep down into her Southern heritage, Shirley Abbott in her memoir Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), interrogates the problematic issue of Southern womanhood. Abbott's Southern childhood experience, which blends the pristine image of the Southern lady with the crude reality of the Southern backwoods, leads her to experience a dual register of emotions. Unable to reconcile these discrepancies, Abbott flees from Arkansas, her Southern homeland, only to anchor back to it years later with her self-narrative that merges local history with personal experience, nostalgia with critical memory."

"Memoirs Will Be Discussed", Athol Daily News (March 28, 2000), p. 2.