Mothers of Invention

Drew Gilpin Faust

Description

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain.

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780807863329
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. All the Relations of Life
Chapter One What Shall We Do?: Women Confront the Crisis
Public Affairs Absorb Our Interest
Your Country Calls
Some Womanly Occupation
A Part to Perform
Chapter Two A World of Femininity: Changed Households and Changing Lives
Thinned Out of Men
The Best Way for Me to Do
The Bitterness of Exile
Home Manufacture
Chapter Three Enemies in Our Households: Confederate Women and Slavery
Unprotected and Afraid
The Fruits of the War
Troubled in Mind
More Expense Than Profit
An Entire Rupture of Our Domestic Relations
Chapter Four We Must Go to Work, Too
To Where Shall We Go for Teachers?
Us Poor Treasury Girls
The Florence Nightingale Business
Chapter Five We Little Knew: Husbands and Wives
Separation Is Always Very Sad
My Longing Wears a Curb
Little Animals
How Queer the Times
Chapter Six To Be an Old Maid: Single Women, Courtship, and Desire
Ever Lovingly and with a Great Desire
I Wish I Was a Soldier’s Wife
Chapter Seven An Imaginary Life: Reading and Writing
A Regular Course of Reading
The Liberty of Writing
Writing and Reading the Confederate Novel
Chapter Eight Though Thou Slay Us: Women and Religion
Affliction Sanctifies
The All Important Subject
War Has Hardened Us
Chapter Nine To Relieve My Bottled Wrath: Confederate Women and Yankee Men
The Day of Woman’s Power
The Right to Bear Arms
Discretion Is the Better Part
Women (Calling Themselves Ladies)
All Was Fair in Love and War
Chapter Ten If I Were Once Released: The Garb of Gender
Anything I Can Get
Hoops Are Subsiding
À la Soldier
In Female Attire
A Man’s Heart and a Female Form
Chapter Eleven Sick and Tired of This Horrid War: Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Self-interest
So Much Rests upon the Mind
You Must Come Home
Mirth and Reckless Revelry
Epilogue. We Shall Never … Be the Same
Afterword. The Burden of Southern History Reconsidered
Notes
Bibliographic Note
ILLUSTRATIONS
Women watch the outbreak of war
Flag made for the Ninth Virginia Cavalry
Women prepare their men for war
Women of Confederate North Carolina
White members of the John Minor Botts household
Refugees
Cotton cards
Socks knitted by Mary Greenhow Lee
Lizzie Neblett
Sarah Hughes
Juliet Opie Hopkins
Phoebe Yates Levy Pember
Kate Cumming
Female hospital visitor
Unidentified Confederate couple
John Hunt Morgan and Martha Ready Morgan
Confederate wives visiting their husbands
Will and Lizzie Neblett after the war
Carrie Berry
Unidentified woman and two Confederate children
Unidentified couple from Texas
Lucy and Nellie Buck
Young Virginia woman
Young woman bereaved by the war
Kate Stone
Augusta Jane Evans
Julia Davidson
The Burial of Latané,
Mourning women
Confederate women and Yankee men in Savannah
Confederate women and Yankee men in Mississippi
Effects of General Order No. 28
Belle Boyd
Confederate woman caught smuggling quinine
Jeff Petticoats
Mary Greenhow Lee
Confederate women confront the enemy
Aftermath of battle
MOTHERS OF INVENTION
The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies
DREW GILPIN FAUST
M others of Invention
WOMEN OF THE SLAVEHOLDING SOUTH IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill & London
© 1996 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of invention : women of the slaveholding South in the American Civil War / by Drew Gilpin Faust. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8078-2255-8 (alk. paper) eISBN : 9780807863329 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Women. 2. Women—Confederate States of America—History. 3. Confederate States of America—History. I. Title. E 628.F35    1996 973-7’ 15042—dc20      95-8896                                          CIP 00    99    98    97             5    4
In Memory of
ISABELLA TYSON GILPIN (1894–1983)
CATHARINE GINNA MELLICK (1895–1989)
CATHARINE MELLICK GILPIN (1918–1966)
PREFACE
When I was growing up in Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother taught me that the term “woman” was disrespectful, if not insulting. Adult females—at least white ones—should be considered and addressed as “ladies.” I responded to this instruction by refusing to wear dresses and by joining the 4-H club, not to sew and can like all the other girls, but to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. My mother still insisted on the occasional dress but, to her credit, said not a negative word about my enthusiasm for animal husbandry.
Looking back, I am sure that the origins of this book lie somewhere in that youthful experience and in the continued confrontations with my mother—until the very eve of her death when I was nineteen—about the requirements of what she usually called “femininity.” “It’s a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be,” she warned. I have been luckier than she in that I have lived in a time when my society and culture have supported me in proving that statement wrong.
My professional historical interest in the South grew out of those early years as well, for I lived in Harry Byrd’s home county during the era of Brown v. Topeka and “massive resistance” to school desegregation, a time when even a young child could not be unaware of adult talk and worry about social transformations in the offing. It was not until I heard news about the Brown decision on the radio that I even noticed that my elementary school was all white and recognized that this was not accident. But I quickly penned a letter to President Eisenhower to say how illogical I thought this seemed in the face of the precepts of equality I had already imbibed by second grade. I confronted the paradox of being both a southerner and an American at an early age.
That I should become a historian, focus my scholarship on the South and the Civil War, and write a book on white women in the Confederacy seems almost overdetermined. That I should dedicate it to the memory of my mother and my two grandmothers—“ladies” who were at the same time the most powerful members of my family—seems entirely fitting. All three were, in fact, women deeply affected by war, though for them the homefront did not merge with battle the way it did for Confederate women. But my grandmothers sent husbands off to Europe in the First World War, and one lost an only brother in a volunteer flying mission over the English Channel. My mother was married in 1942 with less than a week’s notice, and my parents were soon separated for eighteen months by my father’s service overseas. The formal photographs of my father, uncles, and grandfathers that decorated the shelves and tables of my childhood pictured them in uniform. I grew up thinking all men were soldiers.
I have tried to write this book as if my mother and grandmothers were going to read it. After two decades as an academic historian, I sometimes fear I no longer can communicate in a manner that will engage a general reader, but the compelling nature and human drama of this war story have made me want to try. As a consequence, the scholarly reader will find most references to theoretical questions and historiographical debates in the endnotes rather than in the text. I have tried not to drown out the Confederate women’s voices with my own.
In fact, a considerable portion of my interest in this subject has derived from the richness of language and expression in the voluminous collections of writing elite southern women left as their historical legacy. Because they were educated and because they often had leisure time for reflection, they created an extensive written record of self-justification as well as introspection and self-doubt. Although the history of elites has not been a particularly fashionable topic in recent years, I have been attracted to it by the opportunity to use such abundant and revealing sources to explore how military and social crisis can challenge power and privilege to define their essential nature. For the women as well as the men of the South’s master class, the Civil War was indeed, as I am hardly the first to observe, a moment of truth.
The self-consciousness and eloquence of the Confederacy’s elite women, preserved in diaries, letters, essays, memoirs, fiction, and poetry