Armstrong Atlantic State University history professor Nancy White has spent years studying paternalism. Her doctoral thesis centered on antebellum defenses of slavery, and her teaching specialities are the South and women's studies.
She's adamant, however, that you don't have to take a class or open a book to understand how this male-centered system of authority works. Just read the local news, she said.
White recalled she was "shocked" when the 2005 search for a new superintendant of the Savannah-Chatham County School Board got down to its final four and they were all men - two white and two black.
"Eighty percent of the (education) profession is female," said White, who has been at AASU for 12 years. "Am I supposed to believe no woman was qualified?"
The system did name Virginia Edwards superintendant in 1998, but that was understood to be an interim position. "We're just good enough to fill in," said White.
This method of doing business, she said, is deeply entrenched.
"The southern male establishment doesn't want to answer to a woman."
That was certainly no less the case during the 1830s and 1840s, just about the high tide of paternalism. Yet it was during those years that some Savannah women managed to attain a degree of authority - in spite of a system designed to keep them in their place.
When Alexander Telfair died in 1832 he broke his sisters' hearts - and ended the family's male line. Mary and Sarah Telfair soon found themselves making decisions that affected hundreds of slaves at plantations in Georgia and South Carolina.
Writing to the overseer of Thorn Island Plantation in 1837, Sarah gave him specific instructions on how to enrich soil that had been leeched by decades of cotton cultivation.
"The only possible way to prevent it going to ruin is to follow a strict and diligent system of manuring," wrote Sarah. Specifically, the cattle pens were to be lined with oak leaves and pine straw, and after three weeks it all was to be "swept up with the manure and spread as fertilizer." The process was to be repeated every three weeks and represented, she said, the only way to prevent Thorn Island from "going to ruin."
Mary dealt directly with the overseers at two of the Telfairs' Georgia plantations - Retreat in Jefferson County and Mills in Burke County. Retreat was the more profitable of the plantations. For the 1834-35 crop year, its work force produced 49,764 pounds of cotton (166 bales).
But Mary, like Sarah, found 1837 to be a tough year. Writing to her friend Mary Few about the economic panic that was then ravaging the South, Mary Telfair lamented that "The planters quake for their crops - though I am so unfortunate as to be a Planteress I am never troubled about failure in that line. If like the Patriarch I can find food and rainment for them I never trouble myself about money ..."
But such strength from Southern women was rare during the antebellum period. Historian Catherine Clinton, writing in "Tara Revisited: Women, War & the Plantation Legend," said the constraints imposed by paternalism were well defined.
"Planter-class women recognized the financial and legal disabilities imposed by gender, and most accepted those limitations as unalterable," said Clinton, author and editor of several other books on women's lives during that time, including "The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South."
But that acceptance, Clinton noted, should not be interpreted as approval. "Women did not resist so much as resent their dependency," she noted.
That resentment finally came to a boiling point in the last days of the Civil War when Southern women reached their limit. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust said that by late 1864 the patriotism and optimism of 1861 had faded as Union ships blockaded Southern ports and Union armies marched at will through Southern states.
Writing in "Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War," Faust described the chaos that descended upon the Confederacy. Bread riots broke out in several cities, including Savannah, she said, and wives were writing their army husbands, urging them to desert.
Others wrote bitterly to Confederate officials, citing their losses and calling for their remaining loved ones to be sent home. One woman told the secretary of war: "I know my country needs all her children and I had thought I could submit to her requisitions. I have given her cause my prayers, my time, my means and my children but now (that) the last lamb of the fold is to be taken, the mother and helpless woman triumph over the patriot."
Paternalism could no longer meet its obligation to protect and provide for its women. "A nation that had acknowledged no legitimate female political voice," Faust wrote, "had in crisis failed adequately to consider women's needs."
With the end of the war, the legal pillars of paternalism - laws binding blacks and women - were weakened by federal actions and legislation. But the system has never disappeared from the South and its institutions.
White, however, does see its influence gradually fading. The Sun Belt concept, she said, the migration of new people into the South, has only been around for about 30 or 40 years.
"As that goes forward, as more people come here seeking good-paying jobs, paternalism will eventually go away."