I thought I’d do a little digging on “Mrs. Wrenshall,” the longtime President of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore, and found out that Mrs. Wrenshall’s husband, John C. Wrenshall, served as an engineer for the Confederate Army; and that the Wrenshalls had lived in Atlanta (remember Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind– “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again”?) for some years before the decimation of the South during the war forced them north– apparently to Baltimore.

So, yes, the connection between this Club and Confederate sympathies is not only present– I think we will need to address it in a substantive way. Focusing on gender issues and empowerment of women represented by these women’s organizing around intellectual activities should not be a smokescreen for troubling and, speaking frankly, damnable attitudes some? many? all? of these women had about racial minorities, as well as other marginalized groups.

However we decide to present their work, let’s not employ the strategy that Sofia Coppola apparently has adopted in her just-released film about “Confederate wives” during the Civil War, The Beguiled: make it “just about gender.” As I said in our meeting last week, the difficulty will be in doing justice to the entirety of the history, the people, popular/cultural memory, and helping to bend the arc of history toward justice.