Essential Estrogen

There are few things in life which really stick with you. Clothes are updated. Friends move in and out of your life. For Pete's sake, please remember to replace eye make-up every now and again! Furniture gets handed down to a relative, placed on the curb with a 'free' sign or sold in a garage sale. It seems nearly everything is temporary... except Southern accents.

Seeing how my friends at Media Matters have picked up on the Sen. Hillary Clinton 'fake' accent in Alabama last weekend, I've decided maybe my own life experiences can shed some light here. You see, I'm not a native Iowan. Although I married an Iowan, but I am -- and forever will be -- a southern girl. Forget the fact that we've made our home in Iowa for more than a decade, my roots remain just a phone call away.

In times of intense emotion (sadness, joy, anger, elation) my southern accent returns to me just as strong as the day I hopped in the U-Haul. After a half-hour of speaking with my sister on the phone, you'd swear I just blew into town from Mississippi. As the saying goes: You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl.

From my own experience then I call foul on those who believe Clinton was faking an accent in Alabama. The woman lived in Arkansas for nearly two decades and the drawl sticks with you.

While I'm quite sure I could turn on the southern-speak if I desired to do so (just as I'm sure Clinton could as well), there are only certain times and places I'd do so. For instance, I might be willing to bat my eyelashes and unleash a soft, slow southern drawl if I were stopped by a nice male highway patrol officer. I might purposefully relax my jaws in an attempt to persuade my husband to take out the trash or fix something around the house. I've often employed the accent when commanding my dog. (Don't ask me why animals respond better to a southern accent, but they do.) I would never, however, switch to a southern accent anytime I wished to project intelligence and strength.

It didn't take long after moving to Iowa to understand what most folks expected from a woman who possessed such an accent. Think Daisy Duke... Mae West... Loretta Lynn. The perceptions of a woman with a southern accent are quiet different than the perceptions we have for males. Yeah, it's a double-standard, but one that every woman who has ever had/has a southern accent is well aware exists.