Southerners too lonely not be hospitable?

“Southern hospitality was to a great extent the creation of a desperately lonely people…. ‘Strangers are sought after with Greediness,’ wrote an observer. A circuit judge in North Carolina in the Revolutionary War era stopped at the home of some well-to-do newlyweds who were living on the husband’s farm, 18 miles from the nearest neighbor. He wrote that when a male visitor told the young bride he would bring his own wife to visit, she wept with gratitude.”

— From “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines” by Gail Collins (2003)

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