ABSTRACT
Or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma, and joining newly available reissues of Florence King's classic satires on regional gender roles, are a slew of books that either laud or lampoon timehonored notions of southern womanhood. From Deborah Ford and Edie Hand's The Grits (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life to Loraine Despres's The Southern Belle's Handbook: Sissy LeBlanc's Rules to Live By to Jill Conner Browne's Sweet Potato Queens series, the current retail bookshelf is chock-full of titles that take an outdated gender ideal as their subject. Add to the mix volumes such as Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena, Vogue writer Julia Reed's argument for southern difference, and Seale Ballenger's Hell's Belles, a pop history reader that aims to redefine the belle in racially diverse terms (which pretty much negates the whole idea of the belle, but I digress), and you have a veritable trend. Even NASCAR's Ronda Rich (whose book about racetracks, My Life in the Pits, is 180 degrees from belledom) couldn't resist cashing in on this market, publishing What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work. Riding on their coattails is columnist Celia Rivenbark, whose We're Just Like You, Only Prettier: Confessions of a Tarnished Southern Belle has absolutely nothing to do with being either southern or a belle. But at least she can spot a trend.
