Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War

Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War PDF

Author: Kristen Brill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-12

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 131742526X

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Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War is a wide-ranging primary source collection that offers a compelling selection of upper-class, white Confederate women’s voices from archives across the South. From the prison diary of Mary Terry to Elizabeth Baker Crozier’s eyewitness account of the siege of Knoxville, this volume introduces lesser-known voices of the war to show the interconnections between the home front and the front lines, and how the war shaped the lives of women and households across the South. This collection challenges students to engage with the role of first-person narratives in history and to reconsider the roles of southern women in the Civil War. Exploring the themes of slavery, nationalism, secession and occupation, these narratives offer new ways to think about traditional issues in Civil War history and, more broadly, show the ways in which studies of women and gender can enrich studies of cultures of war. This book is designed for undergraduate and graduate students of both the American Civil War and women’s history.

The Civilian War

The Civilian War PDF

Author: Lisa Tendrich Frank

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2015-04-06

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0807159972

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The Civilian War explores home front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman's March, a campaign that put women at the center of a Union army operation for the first time. Ordered to crush the morale as well as the military infrastructure of the Confederacy, Sherman and his army increasingly targeted wealthy civilians in their progress through Georgia and the Carolinas. To drive home the full extent of northern domination over the South, Sherman's soldiers besieged the female domain-going into bedrooms and parlors, seizing correspondence and personal treasures-with the aim of insulting and humiliating upper-class southern women. These efforts blurred the distinction between home front and warfront, creating confrontations in the domestic sphere as a part of the war itself. Historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that ideas about women and their roles in war shaped the expectations of both Union soldiers and Confederate civilians. Sherman recognized that slaveholding Confederate women played a vital part in sustaining the Rebel efforts, and accordingly he treated them as wartime opponents, targeting their markers of respectability and privilege. Although Sherman intended his efforts to demoralize the civilian population, Frank suggests that his strategies frequently had the opposite effect. Confederate women accepted the plunder of food and munitions as an inevitable part of the conflict, but they considered Union invasion of their private spaces an unforgivable and unreasonable transgression. These intrusions strengthened the resolve of many southern women to continue the fight against the Union and its most despised general. Seamlessly merging gender studies and military history, The Civilian War illuminates the distinction between the damage inflicted on the battlefield and the offenses that occurred in the domestic realm during the Civil War. Ultimately, Frank's research demonstrates why many women in the Lower South remained steadfastly committed to the Confederate cause even when their prospects seemed most dim.

Occupied Women

Occupied Women PDF

Author: LeeAnn Whites

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2009-06-15

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0807143952

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In the spring of 1861, tens of thousands of young men formed military companies and offered to fight for their country. Near the end of the Civil War, nearly half of the adult male population of the North and a staggering 90 percent of eligible white males in the South had joined the military. With their husbands, sons, and fathers away, legions of women took on additional duties formerly handled by males, and many also faced the ordeal of having their homes occupied by enemy troops. With occupation, the home front and the battlefield merged to create an unanticipated second front where civilians-mainly women-resisted what they perceived as unjust domination. In Occupied Women, twelve distinguished historians consider how women's reactions to occupation affected both the strategies of military leaders and ultimately even the outcome of the Civil War. Alecia P. Long, Lisa Tendrich Frank, E. Susan Barber, and Charles F. Ritter explore occupation as an incubator of military policies that reflected occupied women's activism. Margaret Creighton, Kristen L. Streater, LeeAnn Whites, and Cita Cook examine specific locations where citizens both enforced and evaded these military policies. Leslie A. Schwalm, Victoria E. Bynum, and Joan E. Cashin look at the occupation as part of complex and overlapping differences in race, class, and culture. An epilogue by Judith Giesberg emphasizes these themes. Some essays reinterpret legendary encounters between military men and occupied women, such as those prompted by General Butler's infamous "Woman Order" and Sherman's March to the Sea. Others explore new areas such as the development of military policy with regard to sexual justice. Throughout, the contributors examine the common experiences of occupied women and address the unique situations faced by women, whether Union, Confederate, or freed. Civil War historians have traditionally depicted Confederate women as rendered inert by occupying armies, but these essays demonstrate that women came together to form a strong, localized resistance to military invasion. Guerrilla activity, for example, occurred with the support and active participation of women on the home front. Women ran the domestic supply line of food, shelter, and information that proved critical to guerrilla tactics. By broadening the discussion of the Civil War to include what LeeAnn Whites calls the "relational field of battle," this pioneering collection helps reconfigure the location of conflict and the chronology of the American Civil War.

Women in the American Civil War

Women in the American Civil War PDF

Author: Lisa . Tendrich Frank

Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Published: 2007-12-03

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9781851096008

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Representing the work of more than 100 scholars, this book treats in depth all aspects of the previously untold story of women in the Civil War.

Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention PDF

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780807855737

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Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

Confederate Daughters

Confederate Daughters PDF

Author: Victoria E. Ott

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2008-02-22

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0809387018

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Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. Author Victoria E. Ott discusses how the loyalty of young Southern women to the fledgling nation, born out of a conservative movement to preserve the status quo, brought them into new areas of work, new types of civic activism, and new rituals of courtship during the Civil War. Social norms for daughters of the elite, their preparation for their roles as Southern women, and their material and emotional connections to the slaveholding class changed drastically during the Civil War. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders. From a position of young womanhood and privilege, they threw their support behind the movement to create a Confederate identity, which was in turn shaped by their participation in the secession movement and the war effort. Their political engagement is evident from their knowledge of military battles, and was expressed through their clothing, social activities, relationships with peers, and interactions with Union soldiers. Confederate Daughters also reveals how these young women, in an effort to sustain their families throughout the war, adjusted to new domestic duties, confronting the loss of slaves and other financial hardships by seeking paid work outside their homes. Drawing on their personal and published recollections of the war, slavery, and the Old South, Ott argues that young women created a unique female identity different from that of older Southern women, the Confederate bellehood. This transformative female identity was an important aspect of the Lost Cause mythology—the version of the conflict that focused on Southern nationalism—and bridged the cultural gap between the antebellum and postbellum periods. Augmented by twelve illustrations, this book offers a generational understanding of the transitional nature of wartime and its effects on women’s self-perceptions. Confederate Daughters identifies the experiences of these teenage daughters as making a significant contribution to the new woman in the New South.

They Fought Like Demons

They Fought Like Demons PDF

Author: DeAnne Blanton

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-09-01

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0807158569

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Popular images of women during the American Civil War include self-sacrificing nurses, romantic spies, and brave ladies maintaining hearth and home in the absence of their men. However, as DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook show in their remarkable new study, that conventional picture does not tell the entire story. Hundreds of women assumed male aliases, disguised themselves in men’s uniforms, and charged into battle as Union and Confederate soldiers—facing down not only the guns of the adversary but also the gender prejudices of society. They Fought Like Demons is the first book to fully explore and explain these women, their experiences as combatants, and the controversial issues surrounding their military service. Relying on more than a decade of research in primary sources, Blanton and Cook document over 240 women in uniform and find that their reasons for fighting mirrored those of men—-patriotism, honor, heritage, and a desire for excitement. Some enlisted to remain with husbands or brothers, while others had dressed as men before the war. Some so enjoyed being freed from traditional women’s roles that they continued their masquerade well after 1865. The authors describe how Yankee and Rebel women soldiers eluded detection, some for many years, and even merited promotion. Their comrades often did not discover the deception until the “young boy” in their company was wounded, killed, or gave birth. In addition to examining the details of everyday military life and the harsh challenges of -warfare for these women—which included injury, capture, and imprisonment—Blanton and Cook discuss the female warrior as an icon in nineteenth-century popular culture and why -twentieth-century historians and society ignored women soldiers’ contributions. Shattering the negative assumptions long held about Civil War distaff soldiers, this sophisticated and dynamic work sheds much-needed light on an unusual and overlooked facet of the Civil War experience.

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