Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta Georgia. She was the third child of Eugene and Maybelle. The Mitchell’s first child died in its infancy.

Margaret’s mother was the president of one of the South’s most militant suffragette groups, instilling the awareness of women’s rights issues in her daughter. Her father was a prominent Atlanta lawyer and president of the Young Men’s Library Association and served on the board of trustees for Carnegie Library, making him rarely accessible to Margaret.

After the family moved out of the house where Margaret was born, her grandmother’s home, Margaret’s mother was fully in charge of her daughter’s upbringing. Nothing Margaret did pleased her mother. According to friends of the Mitchell’s, Maybelle was ‘quick with the hairbrush whenever she thought her daughter was acting spoiled or ill mannered,’ which was often.

The rift between Margaret and other girls her age began when she was just three years old and had her legs badly burned by an open flame furnace. After the accident, Margaret began to wear her brother’s trousers to cover up her scars. Even after the wounds healed, much to her mother’s dismay, Margaret continued to wear trousers. This brought her closer to the boys in the neighborhood but pusher her farther away from the female life. Despite her mother’s best efforts to turn her into a lady, replacing her trousers with skirts and sending her to dance classes, Margaret’s tomboy side could not be contained. She was even accepted as a pitcher on a boy’s baseball team, where she played until she was 14.

Margaret graduated from the local Washington Seminary in 1918 and attended Smith College is Massachusetts to study medicine for a year. After she learned that her fiancé had been killed in the war in Europe, she took no interest in college life. Soon after she learned of the death of her fiancé, Margaret learned that her mother had fallen into a coma caused by pneumonia. When her mother died in 1919, Margaret returned to the home on Peachtree Street to keep house for her father and brother.

Three years later, in 1922, Margaret embarked on a disastrous marriage to Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. Her husband did not support any of Margaret’s ambitions and the marriage got worse as time went by. It culminated in spousal abuse and rape and was annulled in 1924.

Free of her husband’s restrictions, Margaret began working as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal. She worked here for four years, until an ankle injury to a previously injured leg caused her to resign.

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