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Interview #759: Theoryland: An Hour with Harriet McDougal Rigney, Entry #2
Matt Hatch
Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to grow up in Charleston?
Harriet McDougal
Photo by Jim Rigney
Yeah, it was hot! I had relatives all over the place, so there was a wonderful sense of extended family. There were many notions about what girls should and shouldn’t do—that was not so hot—but that was very ingrained. I was a late-born child—my mother was forty-two when I was born—so her attitudes were those of an earlier generation. And mostly, I got along…it was a happy childhood.
Matt Hatch
What was it that girls could and couldn’t do? What comes to mind when you think about that?
Harriet McDougal
Well, it was more…I was raised to “marry well”, meaning money. And actually not money nearly so much as land, and proper blue blood, which in this case meant Confederate…and not much idea at all of a woman making independent money, unless it was as an artist or a writer. But there were no jobs; you could be a secretary. Wonderful. But that was not what I was raised to do.
Matt Hatch
You said you had family, so siblings? How many siblings?
Harriet McDougal
I had one sibling, a full sister who was twenty years older than me, and she was the only one.
Matt Hatch
And she’s since passed away?
Harriet McDougal
Yeah, she has gone. And she was very good to me.
Matt Hatch
Yeah? What’s your favorite memory of her?
Harriet McDougal
Oh gosh, a lot. I loved her Christmas presents. She lived in Chattanooga, not in Charleston; she married when I was three. She was just a nice, younger woman in my life, and with my mother being that much older, she was a friend.
Matt Hatch
So did you have any nieces and nephews through her?
Harriet McDougal
Yes, a niece and a nephew.
Matt Hatch
And they are still…
Harriet McDougal
No, the nephew’s dead, and the niece lives outside of Charleston. She has two sons.
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