Rosemary Daniell (born November 29, 1935) is an American second-wave feminist poet and author. She is best known for her controversial poetry collection, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South and memoirs Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South and Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man.
Early life and education
Born Rosemary Hughes in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 29, 1935, Daniell is the older of two daughters born to Melissa Ruth Connell and Parker McDonald Hughes. After the family moved to Tucker, Georgia, Daniell dropped out of Tucker High School at age 16 to marry her first husband, Laurens Ramos.
Career
Daniell has authored ten books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction, has appeared on national television and radio shows, and has lectured at numerous literary venues. Her work has been featured in more than 32 literary and small press publications, 20 magazines, and 19 anthologies, as well as theater and mixed media productions. Daniell's 1969 article The Feminine Frustration was published in the June 1970 issue of Atlanta Magazine, the first trade magazine article to cover second-wave feminism in the Southeast.
In 1975, Daniell's mother committed suicide and her father died of cancer. That same year, she published her first book of poetry, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South, a book that stirred controversy in the Bible Belt and was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the best works of feminist literature of the era. While her poetry collection The Feathered Trees, published the following year, focused mostly on nature, Daniell's subsequent book Fort Bragg & Other Points South (1988) saw her return to writing about women's sexual experiences.
While Daniell criticizes the traditional role of the Southern woman, her writing does not attack the South, but rather exposes the mythology of the Southern woman and provides a reinterpretation of the South. She breaks the silence about women's private lives - anger and sex - and in the process addresses the myth of the South as a region of moral degeneration and libido.
Her first memoir, Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South (1980), was partially inspired by both her mother's unrealized talents as a writer and her subsequent suicide. Fatal Flowers describes the year Daniell's parents died and her extended period of sexual experimentation following the loss, ending when she founded Zona Rosa and met the man who was to become her fourth husband. Daniell examines the mythology of the Southern woman: materialistic, often the wife of a powerful man, always serving as a perfect hostess, and one loyal to her home and land. She argues that these stereotypes both inhibit women's freedom and stunt their personal growth, thus hindering the expression of their creativity.
Daniell's second memoir, Sleeping with Soldiers (1985), draws from her 1979 experience working as one of the first two women on an oil rig off the coast of Savannah. She describes the men she's attracted to as "macho men": physically strong and courageous risk-takers who stay true to their opinions and the Southern ideal of masculinity, or as she said in defense of Southern men on a talk show in Toronto, those "who communicate viscerally and emotionally rather than intellectually."