Ronda Rich - What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work

What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...43

Table of Contents

SOUTHERN TRUTHS FOR DAILY LIVING

Femininity is a plus in the business
and social worlds.

A woman can be both tough and nice.

Jemper progress with a healthy respect for
tradition and history.

Family and home take precedence over career.

More flies are caught with honey
than with vinegar.

Men love strong, feminine women.

Positive, optimistic attitudes are a necessity of life.

Choose your battles carefully.

Laugh at lifes upsets and turn them to
your advantage.

Kindness and compassion are never
out of date or out of style.

Patience is a virtue and a necessity.

Most Perigee Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

This book is dedicated to my mother, the executive producer of both the author and many of the stories that lie within these pages, and to my agent, Richard Curtis, who saw what I did not see. My heartfelt gratitude to both.

INTRODUCTION

HAIL TO THE BELLES: STRONG AS OAKS, SWEET AS HONEYSUCKLE

IT IS NOT UNUSUAL to find a strong, confident woman who thrives on progress and innovation. It is unusual, however, to find a strong, confident woman who tempers that toughness with a generous amount of grace and charm. Even more unusual is a woman with those traits who also clings to tradition, deeply treasures family, and cherishes history and heirlooms.

Unusual, that is, unless youre in the South, where these women are everywhere.

All my life, I have been surrounded by women whose carefully maintained exteriors beautifully camouflaged a fiery determination and indefatigable spirit. There are those who would call these women the heart of all things Southern. But they are much more than thatthese women are the magnolia-scented breath which sustains the life of the South. They are the backbone of a region once laid waste by war, death, famine, and destruction; a region that resurrected itself through sheer willpower and an adamant refusal to accept defeat.

Much can be learned from these women because they know the misery of relentless adversity, the importance of progress that pays homage to proud tradition as well as the fine art of feminine toughness enchantingly embroidered with irresistible charm. The strong traditional Southern woman does not whine or complain. She conforms when necessary, but mostly she simply overcomes lifes trials and tribulations.

From the bayous of Louisiana to the cotton fields of Mississippi to the mountains of North Georgia to the Carolina coast, these women have reigned supreme since April 12, 1861, when a single shot from Fort Sumter, South Carolina, changed their lives and charted a new course for all generations to come. The legacy, which began on that fateful day, has grown more bold, proud, and intense as the years have passed.

The humiliation of defeat gives birth to a resilience that bounces higher than any ups or downs in life. It teaches vital survival skills that, otherwise, would never be learned. Losing the Civil War is the best thing that ever happened to the women of the South. That loss taught them to be winners, a tradition that has been passed on as a flaming torch of pride to subsequent generations.

Defeat, famine, and destruction combined with the glorious prewar years of refinement and hospitality to create a unique breedindependent, indestructible women whose strong oak interiors are beautifully camouflaged with an overlay of sweet honeysuckle vines.

For the slave women freed by the war, the victory was, at best, hollow, because life became even more challenging. For the next century, they would fight to find their place in a culture to which they had once been captive. One hundred years of grappling and struggling has its rewards, too, and those women bequeathed their hard-earned strength, dignity, and indestructible spirit to their heirs. From their loins would spring the grandchildren who would rise up as civil rights activists. Although discrimination had long held the entire world in its ugly grasp, it was from the heart of the South that the civil rights movement reared its indignant head. It was powered, quite simply, by Southern mothers who taught their sons to be proud and to fight for a gentler, more loving nation; mothers who believed that adversity of any kind could be overcome through hard work and dedication. Then, of course, there were the women who fought in the trenches beside them during the movement and used every ounce of their Southern womanhood to fight the war of an entire nation.

Whether we are descendants of plantation owners, farmers, slaves, moonshiners, tenant farmers, craftsmen, riverboat captains, or merchants, we are the daughters of the South, the embodiment of moxie, determination, and tender femininity. Molded by history, wedded to tradition, committed to the future, we tackle life with a customized and paradoxical blend of toughness and kindness.

Common threads of charm, strength, and resilience are woven carefully through the Souths cultural fabric, weaving together women from different races and economic levels. Be they Appalachian women, often strangers to common luxuries, or freed slaves whose great-granddaughters became civil rights activists, or the millions of middle-class women who successfully bridge the gaps among home, family, and career, Southern women brazenly attack the storms of life. With unique style, they wear the battle armor of soldiers while maintaining the soft, virginal hearts of ingenues. Southern women staunchly believe that it is possible to be both tough warriors and sensuous, delicate lovers.

Next page

1234567...43

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work»

Look at similar books to What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Christie Farnham

The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South

Clea Simon

The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats

Caroline M. Dillman

Southern Women

Jane Turner Censer

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895

Ida Smith

Amazing Southern Recipes You Will Love: Southern Recipes That Will Satisfy Your Cravings

Loraine Despres

The Southern Belles Handbook: Sissy LeBlancs Rules to Live By

Robin O. Warren

Women on Southern Stages, 1800-1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater

Candace Bailey

Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South

Rutledge

Miss Beckys charm school: using southern belle secrets to land your man

Jaime Harker

The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon

Zinn

The Southern Mystique

Elna C. Green

Southern strategies: southern women and the woman suffrage question

Discussion, reviews of the book What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets to Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.