ABSTRACT
Scarlett had sisters all across the South, even in North Carolina. This is Frank Kennedy’s reaction when he discovers his wife, Scarlett, is about to go into the lumber business for herself. Gone With the Wind is, of course, fiction, but on the question of gender roles in Southern society, Mitchell has not led us too far astray. Of course Southern women of certain class did not work or run businesses in South, but notice Frank goes on to list six different ways in which women did make money. A wife with her husband’s consent could file for an exemption from common-law disabilities in order to carry on a trade or business in her own account.” An 1876 state supreme court ruling clarified the act: the contracts entered into by a free trader only referred to her separate estate and only if it benefited her estate. North Carolina would not eliminate common-law disabilities from married women’s properly rights until 1911.
