Southern Culture Research Articles

Traumatized Interpretations of Female Characters in American Southern Culture in The Glass Menagerie

Traumatized Interpretations of Female Characters in American Southern Culture in The Glass Menagerie

Radio Free Dixie from Cuba to the Black Belt: mapping Black nationhood through cartographies of sonic rhetoric

ABSTRACT In this essay, I follow sound across hegemonic geopolitical boundaries to map its place-making force in the emergence of new forms of nationhood. Through an analysis of Mabel and Robert F. William’s radio show, Radio Free Dixie, I argue that racialized Southern culture was respatialized and reimagined, positioning the Black Belt as a Black nation where citizenship is rooted in self-determination. This analysis demonstrates that utilizing sonic rhetorics as a mode through which to uncover Black geographies offers insight into practices of nation building that diverge from existing forms of Westphalian sovereignty that manifest as colonial and racialized domination.

Making the Invisible Visible: For a Climate Future

Abstract: Climate change is rapidly transforming our world in ways both visible and invisible. Greenhouse gases—invisible to the human eye—cause climate change, with widespread impacts to which we now bear witness. Devastating floods and record-breaking heat waves are some more visible effects. There are others that remain mostly unseen. Making the invisible visible is at the core of this issue of Southern Cultures : using images and words from the contemporary South to show the ubiquity of climate change and how we all experience it. The latest climate science describes in stark detail a narrowing window for meaningful climate action. Despite the science, and policymakers' attempts to negotiate a solution, we haven't yet turned a corner on climate change. While we have the solutions to reduce emissions today, we lack the requisite inspiration and will.

Modeling the local geography of country music concerts in U.S. urban areas: insights from big data analysis of live music events

Music cities leverage live music as a tool for urban revitalization. Identifying influential industries in U.S. urban areas that have shaped the country music landscape can provide valuable insights into the role of the music industry in urban development. The ‘big data’ of country music concerts obtained from Spotify were examined to discern the relative importance of food and transportation services in explaining the spatial distribution of country music concerts from 2009 to 2019. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) analyses show that both food and transportation services have a positive relationship with country music concerts. The analysis also reveals that the majority of country music concerts occurred in urbanized areas. Although country music has successfully spread throughout the entire country, there are distinctive regional clusters in large cities such as Nashville, Dallas, New York City, and Austin. The result also indicates the strength of GWR in improving and sustaining the explanatory power of models. The GWR was implemented to execute four models separately considering different explanatory variables and a comparative analysis of the model performance then suggested that food service appears to perform best, whilst bus service performs better than train service and air service. These findings highlight the roles of food and transportation service facilities that have made country music — a form of Southern culture visible in the urban landscape. This study encourages music cities to harness the potential of big data's power to foster vibrant industrial ecosystems in urban environments.

Female Gothic, Modernity and the Aesthetics of Change: Demythologising the South in Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty, an American fiction writer, brings forth women’s issues and promotes feminist ethics in her writings: novels and short stories. Her stories reveal her concern with the extended subordination of women under machismo in Southern America. More significantly, her work highlights the growth of women’s liberal thinking during the development of modernity in the southern parts of America. She looks at the change in time and thought under modernity to examine the local culture and literature with a critical eye on the strict gender order in the South. Her fiction explores varied forms of oppression in marriage, kinship, and community structure of the changing South through female Gothicism. In depicting her female characters as fleeing spatial confinement for freedom and self-transformation, Welty develops an aesthetic of mobility that threatens the mythologized constructions of Southern culture. This eventually leads to a reactionary modernism that calls for the redefinition of identity and culture in the history of Southern America. For centuries, the South has been considered the most segregated, white-centric patriarchal society due to its particular culture, geography and history. The change in thought and culture caused by modernity becomes a threat to the customary plantation business as well as to the conservative male hierarchical order as it engenders a revision of women’s identity. This study may help in further research on Gothic literary studies in combination with discourses on culture and women’s identity in literary works.Keywords: Female Gothic, mythologized culture, modernity, Southern America, women’s identity

Southern Rural Feminism: U.S. Women Farmers in Production Agriculture

Although U.S. women’s contributions to farming are vital, scholarship on U.S. female farmers is limited, especially in the U.S. South. Twelve women farmers in the Southern United States were interviewed about their experiences and opportunities in production agriculture. This study offers further nuance of the sociological and theoretical complexity and interpretive power of difference feminism and intersectionality, focusing on region and place, to a concept we call Southern Rural Feminism. Participants promote women’s equality yet acknowledge gender differences between the binary gender categories of men and women, where the uniqueness of a woman’s touch offers value to the agriculture industry. Nearly all participants’ everyday life in southern agriculture was grounded in the participants’ Christian faith, and some women used Christianity to explain gender dynamics. Within the context of the traditional rural southern culture, all women experienced differential gendered treatment in the industry, from welcomed gentlemanly behavior and gendered slights to more severe discrimination and harassment. Despite widespread gender problems, findings suggest most women do not view systematic gender oppression in the industry, do not adhere to feminist labels, and are cautiously optimistic about the future of female farmers. Incorporating theoretical discussions of Southern Rural Feminism is vital given U.S. Southern Farm Women’s restricted material access to land, and full participation in production agriculture, a field with tremendous gender inequities.

"Up on Cripple Creek": Limb Loss, Difference, and Disability Spectacle in Southern Roots Music

This essay explores the experiences and representations of several southern roots musicians with limb loss or limb differences. Through an examination of the lives of the one-armed Carolinian banjoist and busker "Uncle" Frank Rayborn in the 1950s and 1960s, amputee Confederate veterans who performed at early-twentieth century fiddlers' contests, the one-armed "barn dance" radio musician Emory Martin, and the African-American bluesman "Peg Leg" Howell, this essay explores wider issues of patronage, voyeurism, agency in the roots music—particularly old-time, country, and blues—in the twentieth-century US South. In the process, this essay draws attention to the juncture where disability, poverty, gender, and race meet in the South, and calls us to reconsider narratives of embodiment, difference, and spectacle not at the "extremities" of southern culture and history but at their cores.

To Build for the Future

This article offers a brief introduction to the Disability issue of Southern Cultures. It briefly recounts the contexts for disabled politics and scholarship, and then spotlights the issue's contents within those contexts. Each article in the issue is briefly discussed. Framed around the multiple methods of self-definition and community-building in which disabled people have historically engaged, Hughes calls on the issue's readers to use it as both a source of information and an impetus for further storytelling and action.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry Lingfeng Nie (bio) Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry (eds.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor, The Modern Language Association of America, 2019, 260 pp., $29.00, ISBN: 978-1-6032-9406-5. The popular MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature has been committed to providing instructors with specific pedagogical advice on literary works or writers. This volume on Flannery O'Connor is the first book dedicated to a major Southern woman writer, filling a gap in the scholarly literature on approaches to teaching O'Connor. The editors are distinguished O'Connor experts: Donahoo has coauthored Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism (2020), and Gentry is the editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review. They have gathered twenty great O'Connor scholars and instructors who have met the daunting challenge of teaching O'Connor's oeuvre, produced in the mid-twentieth century, to high school and college students in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The result is an ambitious anthology, providing perceptive readings as well as updated approaches to teaching O'Connor. The book is appropriately divided into two parts. The first, much shorter part, "Materials," introduces an invaluable compendium of background information, such as a succinct summary of accessible editions of O'Connor's works, a useful list of reference works—mainly biographies and monographs—for teaching O'Connor, a review of the most significant critical scholarship on O'Connor (involving historical, religious, and Southern culture studies), and a guide to the audiovisual resources related to O'Connor (including film adaptations, documentaries, and digital resources). There is also a brief but helpful mention of the collection of O'Connor manuscripts housed at Georgia College and State University and Emory University. This part closes with an extremely small segment on O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah and her final home, in Andalusia. Guided by the results of an online survey of 149 instructors teaching O'Connor, "Approaches," the second and most substantial part, is organized into five sections to address thorny issues confronting them and offer new pedagogical strategies to approach the works of O'Connor. The first section, "The Author as Teacher: O'Connor as Self-Critic," focuses on O'Connor's comments on her own works and Brantley's suggestions on how to use O'Connor's correspondence to engage students, revealing how she "wanted to shape or at least take part in the critical discourse on her work" (47). The subsequent section, "O'Connor and Religion," meaningfully unravels the most common myth—that O'Connor's works are evidence of her Christian faith, which has long been "a mainstay for O'Connor criticism and a stumbling block for teachers" (30). "Contexts: Race, History, Film, and Science," the third section, not only situates O'Connor in historical, [End Page 123] social, and cultural context but also proposes interdisciplinary approaches by putting O'Connor's works in dialogue with science and technology studies and ecocriticism. The following section—for me, the most interesting section—"O'Connor and Other Authors," considers O'Connor's corpus in conjunction with authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Junot Díaz, and Toni Morrison, as well as in the context of popular music. This part ends with the valuable section, "Specialized Perspectives," opening the study of O'Connor to new angles and topics, including, for example, women's studies, narrative stylistics, and disability and medical studies in accordance with the development of modern literary theory. The essays collected in the volume, although diverse in scope and topic, are bonded together by the persistent effort to fully capture the complexity of O'Connor and her works. It is assumed that O'Connor is interesting to students only as a Catholic Southern writer, and her works make sense only through "theology and her personal religious beliefs" (3). The book reveals a multifaceted, modern O'Connor who defies easy summation and whose works have continuing value and lend themselves readily to various pedagogical approaches and critical theories. For example, Doug Davis recommends...

Anthologizing Gwen Flager’s plays in southern lesbian theater

With limited anthologizing of southern United States lesbian theater, the purpose of this article is twofold: to anthologize the work of Gwen Flager, self-identified southern lesbian playwright and to interpret Flager’s work as intentionally disruptive to gender and sexual norms through humor and a centering of southern lesbian identity. Flager is an award-winning playwright with U.S. southern roots. Born in Oklahoma in 1950, she spent many years in Louisiana and Alabama before relocating to Houston, Texas. Member of the Scriptwriters Houston, Dramatists Guild of America, and New Play Exchange, she won the 2017 Queensbury Theater’s New Works playwriting competition for her original script, Shakin’ the Blue Flamingo, which premiered in 2018 after a 12-month development process. By offering a series of untold stories about and from various perspectives of U.S. southern lesbian characters who navigate southern cuisine, history, identity, race, class, nationalism, and self-realization throughout the late twentieth century, Flager positions her characters and the plays themselves as owners of the best version of southern culture, shifting the center to an oft-marginalized southern lesbian identity.

Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock by Michael Ray FitzGerald

Reviewed by: Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock by Michael Ray FitzGerald Ben Wynne Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock. By Michael Ray FitzGerald. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2020. Pp. xiv, 207. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6665-3.) In this compact volume, Michael Ray FitzGerald gives readers an overview of the origins of a musical movement that helped alter popular culture in the United States. While many use the term southern rock to label this movement, it was actually broader and more layered. It included the work of a number of musicians who had southern roots in common, but who also flourished because of their individuality. While FitzGerald notes that calling Jacksonville “the birthplace of southern rock” is “strictly speaking, hyperbole” and [End Page 189] “erroneous,” the significant infusion of talent that the city provided the music industry in the late 1960s and beyond is undeniable (p. 13). The author argues that southern rock might be simply a variation of country rock “with more rock,” and he cites Gram Parsons as an alternating direct and underlying influence on those who helped create the genre (p. 29). Originally from Waycross, Georgia, Parsons spent his early life in Jacksonville, a testament to the Florida city’s reputation as the cultural capital of south Georgia, where many from that region ended up congregating. Parsons’s career was famously cut short by alcohol and drug use, but he had established a musical reputation that lived on in fact and legend. The author takes some exception to Parsons’s place in history as the first to promote “country rock” but still recognizes him as a pivotal figure who bravely bridged “the gap between hippies and rednecks” during the late 1960s and early 1970s (p. 28). Parsons is thus significant to one of the author’s conclusions, that southern rock is “a dialectic of two opposing philosophies: the nonviolent, long-haired, drug-using hippie and the hard-drinking, brawling, fiercely independent redneck” (p. 152). FitzGerald also does a nice job relating the early history of the Allman Brothers Band, the group whose star burns brightest in the constellation of southern rock heroes. In this regard, the book takes a potentially tedious story and makes it digestible for the reader. The Allman Brothers Band rose out of a collection of personalities and bands that performed in Jacksonville and elsewhere, among them the Allman Joys, Second Coming, and the 31st of February. The cast of characters is many and varied, but FitzGerald does an admirable job of telling their stories, whether of rock icons like Duane and Gregg Allman or lesser-known but still significant players like Johnny Sandlin and Paul Hornsby, who also had great careers as producers. FitzGerald recognizes guitarist Dickey Betts’s country proclivities as the driving force behind the band’s “southern” image, noting that the Allman Brothers Band changed in force and character when the guitarist sang lead—not into something better or worse, but into something different. By tracing the careers of a cross section of other prominent Jacksonville-area bands, FitzGerald paints southern rock with broader strokes while proving that a succinct definition of the term is impossible to pin down. Lynyrd Skynyrd promoted the “redneck” elements of southern rock through its iconic hit “Sweet Home Alabama” and its aggressive use of Confederate imagery, while Cowboy’s releases on Capricorn Records, the famous southern rock label in Macon, Georgia, were a softer sound, “more like the California country rock of Gram Parsons or Poco” (p. 70). Toiling in the shadows of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, 38 Special had more chart hits than both of those acts combined, while the band Molly Hatchet broke through and then quickly burned out. FitzGerald finally offers a brief treatment of the career of Derek Trucks, the nephew of Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks, pointing out that he may represent either the future of southern rock or its final flourish. Anyone with an interest in music history, southern culture, or the bands included in this book will certainly enjoy what Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock has to offer. [End Page 190] Ben...

Information about Contributors

Other| January 01 2023 Information about Contributors Journal of American Folklore (2023) 136 (539): 126–127. https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.539.19 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Information about Contributors. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2023; 136 (539): 126–127. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.539.19 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search Danille Elise Christensen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech, where she is faculty in the Material Culture & Public Humanities graduate program and the Food Studies program. Her areas of expertise include folklore, American studies, Appalachian studies, and the ethnography of communication. Using genre and performance as analytical lenses, she examines the politics of knowledge production, transmission, and valuation; her work on ritualized sport, scrapbook-making, gardening, indigenous foodscapes, and food preservation can be found in sources that include the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Southern Cultures, and several edited volumes. Her forthcoming book explores who has promoted home canning in the United States over the last two centuries, and why.James Counts Early is the former director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution where, from 1984–2015, he... You do not currently have access to this content.

New Framing for Familiar Topics

Book reviews and feature essays in this issue of the Civil War Book Review touch on familiar topics—emancipation, Lincoln’s relationship to African Americans, the Civil War in an international context, commander biographies, Civil War unit histories, gender, southern culture, and Civil War era literature. However, the essays and books featured herein approach these familiar topics from new angles and, as a result, provide fresh insight into otherwise standard subjects.

The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South

"During the past four decades, Charles Reagan Wilson has become a leading interpreter of the American South. Southern Way of Life, which he began writing in 1989, represents a culmination of Wilson’s distinguished career as a historian of southern culture. Informed by critical regionalist theory, he carefully defines the South as a highly diverse place that includes divergent races, ethnic groups, and LGBTQ subcultures. For those interested in a general and very thoughtful survey of the history of the South since 1865, Southern Way of Life will likely become a standard work."

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Sophia Devereux Turner and the Troubled Female Mind in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South

Sophia Devereux Turner and the Troubled Female Mind in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South Sylvia D. Hoffert (bio) Late in 1877 a distraught Josiah Turner Jr. wrote to his brother-in-law, "I am unwilling the world should know what a place of torture and torment my house has been made to my children and myself, these many years. I must find some place for Sophia other than my house. I am sure neither God [n]or Society require that I should longer tolerate and suffer; nor will I attempt to say how much agony and anguish this announcement creates." He and his wife, Sophia Devereux Turner, lived just outside Hillsborough, North Carolina, a small Orange County village on the Eno River. Sophia was addicted to morphine. Desperate to be rid of her, Josiah used emotional blackmail to induce her to seek treatment and convinced the doctors at the North Carolina Hospital for the Insane in Raleigh to admit her in 1878.1 A great deal of ink has been devoted to the subject of mental illness and its treatment in nineteenth-century America. Historians have focused on the development of insane asylums, the reform-minded male doctors who ran them, and the therapies they used to treat their patients.2 Specialists in women's history have noted the degree to which [End Page 681] social and cultural considerations, including the assumption that women's reproductive capacity predisposed them to insanity, guided male doctors in their diagnosis and treatment of female mental disorders.3 And feminist literary scholars have critiqued the post–Civil War memoirs of northern women who protested their involuntary commitment to that region's mental hospitals in an effort to bring about legal reform.4 Little attention has been paid, however, to the intellectual and emotional life of drug-addicted women diagnosed as insane who populated southern insane asylums in the late nineteenth century. One exception is John S. Hughes's edition of Andrew Moore Sheffield's letters, published in 1993. Accused of arson; known to abuse chloral hydrate, an opiate used to induce sleep; and fond of alcohol, Sheffield was committed to the Alabama Insane Hospital (eventually called Bryce Hospital) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, by her brother and father in 1890. An intelligent, socially prominent, single woman of forty-one, she was noted for refusing to conform to prevailing social conventions pertaining to women. Despite her angry and persistent pleas for release, her lobbying efforts failed, and she remained in the asylum for almost thirty years, until her death in 1920. Sheffield's letters are particularly valuable for the details they provide about conditions in insane asylums and the care that patients diagnosed as mentally ill received in the South after the Civil War.5 The case of Sophia Turner offers another perspective on life among the mad in the South. Family correspondence relating to the time she spent in the hospital provides further evidence of the willingness of laypeople and their doctors to equate drug addiction with mental illness. [End Page 682] The compellingly introspective poems that Sophia wrote during the almost three years she spent as an asylum patient provide extraordinary insight into the way that one afflicted woman dealt with the consequences of a diagnosis of insanity. The poems also allow us to enter not just the world of the asylum but also the mind of an inmate experiencing separation from her loved ones, treatment for an addiction she could not control, and life among strangers.6 Unlike the reminiscences and memoirs of former asylum patients, Sophia's poems served as a vehicle that allowed her to express feelings and emotions in the moment, raw and uncensored by the passage of time or concern about the judgment of others.7 Carefully dated, they helped her keep track of time in an environment where one day could be very much like every other. The act of writing poetry as much as any treatment prescribed by her doctors served as a balm to her troubled mind as well as a vehicle that allowed her to transcend her identity as an obedient wife, devoted mother, and dutiful housekeeper in a southern culture that...

The space between the riot and i

the space between the riot and i is a solo performed by Majesty Royale that uses movement and sound to investigate alternative modes of existence, memory, and ghostly inhabitance. The work exposes the physical body and sensorial landscape to rigorous transformation located in the liminal space between “here-now” and “then-there.” Majesty becomes a channel to emergent mythologies of the underworld with ritual practices derived from Black southern culture: sampling, chanting, sermon-ing, and marching.Majesty Royale is a dancer, shaper, sound explorer, and ghost. Majesty grew up in the land of the Eno and Occaneechi peoples (Durham, NC) and is based in Lenni-Lenape land (Philadelphia, PA). Majesty is a graduate of the University of the Arts (BFA Dance), 2020 Pina Bausch Choreography Fellow, and 2021 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist. https://www.glitterboiwonder.com/

Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough

Reviewed by: Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough Clarissa W. Confer Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. By Fay A. Yarbrough. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) This slim volume traces the Choctaws’ wartime experience in a few chapters, which are book-ended by other chapters covering traditional Choctaw culture and the Reconstruction period, including an unpersuasive foray into the imagined effect of war on masculinity. The author’s research entails a fairly standard use of available sources—tribal nation papers, the Indian-Pioneer Papers collection at the University of Oklahoma, W.P.A. narratives, and government records—that I, Mary Jane Warde, and others have also used in analyzing the nations of Indian Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case, Fay Yarbrough looks at the material through the lens of slavery and race relations. Her expressed intent to connect this past to issues of the present sets the tone for her work. The book begins with a standard history of the Choctaw people, explaining traditional aspects of social structure, such as matrilineal descent and the role of clans. Like so many Native groups, the Choctaws experienced extensive change in the nineteenth century, brought on primarily by White expansion westward. One example is gender roles. As the century progressed, Native women lost their status as agricultural producers. Although the author attributes this entirely to the development of slavery, this change actually stems from a wide range of factors, most notably White male expectations. In that and many other ways, Choctaw society began to look more like White southern culture. The Choctaw were one of the five Native nations removed to Indian Territory from the southeastern United States who practice slavery; however, because enslaved people made up only 14 percent of the Choctaw population by 1860, a much smaller percentage than in any of its neighboring states, there are marked differences between Choctaw culture and the Deep South. Unlike in slave states, the Choctaw nation had a path for citizenship for slaves through blood ties to a Choctaw. Deep South plantations would have looked very different had White masters offered citizenship to blood relations among their slaves. Like their slaveholding neighbors, however, the Choctaw also tightened the legal structure governing bondage in the post-Nat Turner period of the 1830s. Although Choctaw citizens’ engagement in this slave economy influenced their decision to participate in the Civil War, this was only one of several such influences. The question of how and why Indian nations chose sides in the national conflict has been examined and debated in many books, and Yarbrough revisits that question. The core principle for all the nations was tribal sovereignty, and the attractive alliance package offered by Confederate leaders seemed the best way to preserve it. The Choctaw followed a path [End Page 124] similar to the Cherokees, seeking neutrality first, eventually allying with the Confederacy, and then forming armed mounted units for the Confederate army. The author leans heavily on Cherokee history to flesh out the story of the Choctaw, but the problem with this strategy is that the Cherokee were uniquely divided by the removal experience, and those fissures shaped their responses. In contrast to the Cherokee, the Choctaw remained loyal to the Confederacy throughout the war, despite breeches of treaty promises. The Confederacy, for that matter, did not adequately support any of its Native allies, resulting in poor wartime conditions, desertions, and leadership lapses among them. The Civil War in Indian Territory, as scholars have been arguing for decades, devolved into an internal civil war. No Native nation gained from the experience. The Choctaw location on the southern edge of Indian Territory made that area a popular destination for a flow of refugees from the war, which put corresponding pressures on the nation, although that is not discussed here. Even so, the Choctaw maintained their unity throughout the war. Unfortunately, the chapter about Reconstruction focuses only on the Choctaw freedpeople and does not examine the intriguing situation in which Choctaws negotiated a more favorable peace treaty than the other nations who fought the United States. The...

Young Khmer Women’s Expectation on Their Future Spouse

Society is constantly moving and changing. Criteria for choosing a life partner is very important for each person and so are Khmer girls in Vietnam. To find out the criteria for choosing a life partner of Khmer women today, the author uses the survey questionnaires and in-depth interviews with 20 Khmer female second-year students in School of Vietnam Southern Khmer Language, Culture, and Arts, Tra Vinh University. The results show that 80% of interviewees think that marriage is important in life, 65% set up their criteria for choosing a life partner with a stable career. 75% share the same opinion that those who have been monastics are knowledgeable, virtuous, have an altruistic, tolerant heart, have mature thoughts, and have a deep understanding of Khmer morality and customs.

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Rise of American Liberalism

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Rise of American Liberalism