Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
March 4, 1996
Faust (The Creation of Confederate Nationalism) makes a major contribution to both Civil War historiography and women's studies in this outstanding analysis of the impact of secession, invasion and conquest on Southern white women. Antebellum images based on helplessness and dependence were challenged as women assumed an increasing range of social and economic responsibilities. Their successes were, however, at best mixed, involving high levels of improvisation. The failure of Southern men to sustain their patriarchal pretensions on the battlefield also broke the prewar gender contract of dependence in return for protection. Women of the South after 1865 confronted both their doubt about what they could accomplish by themselves and their desire to avoid reliance on men. The women's rights movement in the South thus grew from necessity and disappointment-a sharp contrast to the ebullient optimism of its Northern counterpart. Faust's provocative analysis of a complex subject merits a place in all collections of U.S. history. Photos.
November 1, 1996
YA-Privileged, upper-class white women of the Confederacy faced overwhelming changes in their lives as men went off to war and they struggled with new and demanding responsibilities. Having to run farms and manage often insubordinate slaves, learn to perform menial domestic chores, cope with loneliness and shortages of food and clothing, and provide support to the army thrust them into situations that their gender had never coped with in antebellum southern life. Those women found themselves needing to learn new skills, often contrary to their social upbringing. Some retreated into themselves, but many, moved not only by patriotism but also by a reluctant new freedom, crossed social barriers to become teachers, nurses, shopkeepers, and writers. Forced by necessity, they reinvented themselves. Through their own words from diaries, journals, and letters, and from newspapers, Faust carefully analyses the issues of gender and class as well as attitudes regarding race that permeated these women's lives. A thought-provoking study that will be an excellent supplement for women's studies and American history classes.-Mary T. Gerrity, Queen Anne School Library, Upper Marlboro, MD
March 1, 1996
Faust's exceedingly readable volume may be considered a fine nonfiction companion to "Gone with the" "Wind" and Mary Chesnut's famous diary. It focuses on upper-class southern women, who before the Civil War had made a workable bargain with patriarchy: protection in return for limited spheres of free activity and competence. The war threw this bargain not merely into the melting pot but into the furnace, and such women were simultaneously faced with a broken contract, which they resented, and a series of challenges that many of them met as interestingly as Margaret Mitchell's heroine. Subsequently, the same women became the backbone of the effort to reimpose the prewar hierarchy of race and class. In addition to its rare readability, Faust's effort is full of insights and even wit. Altogether, it is one of the most admirable recent volumes of American social history. ((Reviewed March 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)