An August 31, 1915 edition of the Americus Times-Recorder demonstrates this dialogue. The satirical column described Lizzie boys as “perfumed” and “delicate,” strolling the public square with polished shoes, fitted coats, and a studied aloofness. Though often lifted from other newspapers, the popularity of these snippets in the Americus press suggests that local readers saw something familiar in these caricatures. The newspaper functioned not just as entertainment but as a tool of social instruction, reinforcing regional ideals of masculinity tied to labor, humility, and heterosexual restraint. In effect, the ridicule served to delimit acceptable expressions of manhood for young white boys in Sumter County.

Historian Julia Grant’s work, particularly in “A Real Boy and Not a Sissy,” helps frame the local obsession with sissy boys as part of a broader national trend. Grant outlines how the early 20th century saw emotional expressiveness, fashion consciousness, and even artistic interest increasingly viewed as pathological in boys. While Americus did not yet pathologize such traits through psychiatry, its citizens engaged in a kind of grassroots moral regulation, using gossip, print culture, and public space to shame effeminacy. To deviate from gender expectations risked social ostracism, and Lizzie boys became a symbolic flashpoint for that tension.

Similarly, Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization provides a wider cultural lens, arguing that white anxieties about gender were deeply entwined with fears of racial and civilizational decline. The Lizzie Boy in Americus symbolized not just individual softness but a generational failure to uphold white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalist productivity. In a region still recovering from Reconstruction and increasingly challenged by modernization, the effeminate white boy threatened to collapse the social order from within. The fear was not just of what he was—but what he failed to become.

Likewise, William Kountz’s popular humorous text, Billy Baxter’s Letters, mirrored this masculine performance anxiety in a rapidly modernizing society. Baxter, a naïve and often bumbling character, repeatedly misreads social cues and is out of place in business, politics, and romantic life. He is not effeminate in the Lizzie boy sense, but his immaturity and lack of control serve as another foil for the ideal man. His letters reveal the precariousness of early 20th-century masculinity, showing how difficult it was for young men to live up to expectations of worldly competence and emotional restraint. Americus readers would likely have recognized in Baxter a cautionary tale: the man who fails to grow up correctly becomes the town joke.