Southern Belle - The documentary

Today I intend to introduce a hotly debated documentary, broadcasted last year by PBS. The film itself follows three girls' days who are reenacting the everyday life of Southern Belles as taking part in the annual reenactment of Athenaeum Girls' School in Columbia, Tennessee. The girls volunteer not only to dress up, dance and sing like their ancestors, but also to give up their modern rights and for the period of the reenactment camp live according to female rights under the Civil War era. The desire to step out from our modern manners and dresses and the need for the revival of the chivalric past strengthens the idea that the Southern belle's image is still very much alive in the American mind.The aim of the camp is not only to dress up and have fun, but to learn genteel manners and build pride in Southern heritage. For this reason, the girls are given a wide variety of lectures and trainings. However, the intensive historical camp was fiercely attacked by historians. Though the camp is designed to reconstruct Southern ladies' life in the good old days, it teaches false values that contribute to everyday race and gender roles in the 21th century. First and foremost scholars opposed the camp's intention to neglect to incorporate the issue of slavery, since it was a core experience of the Southern belles' everyday life. Since in the film there are no slaves who would dress up the ladies, as it happened before and during the Civil War, one can claim that history is presented in a distorted way. On the other hand, in modern times it would be quite racist to recruit Black boys and girls for a reenactment camp to inact slavery again. It is not surprising, that the documentary provoked many questions in the public's mind.

Sources:
Southern Belle - ITVS : www.itvs.org/films/southern-belle