A Sheltered Life

Abstract

Eudora Welty has never been comfortable with feminism. She has lived most of her life where she was born, in the settled community of Jackson, Mississippi. Hers has been a social world in which clear distinctions have always existed between the roles of men and women and where the Southern tradition of masculine chivalry has offered courtesy and deference to white women of her class. When interviewers have tried to press her on Women’s Liberation or the particular trials of the woman writer, she has resisted. ‘I’m not interested in any kind of feminine repartee,’ she told Charles Bunting in 1972. ‘All that talk of women’s lib doesn’t apply at all to women writers. We’ve always been able to do whatever we’ve wished.’¹ Six years later in a conversation with a young woman who championed Tille Olsen’s outspoken feminism, Welty agreed that women writers have been at a disadvantage compared to men, but she denied that her own career had been affected by her sex. Always an intensely private person, she said she hated ‘the grotesque quality’ of the women’s movement, feeling that the extreme behaviour of some activists made ‘comedians of all of us’ and that change could be achieved in quieter ways (CNVRS, pp. 250–51).