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Copyright (c) 1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

 

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, have provided this study with documentation of extraordinary range as well as richness. Diaries written for the author's eyes alone, for her children, or for posterity must of course be interpreted differently from letters addressed to particular individuals, or novels produced within the constraints of popular contemporary genres, or reminiscences composed through a haze of reconstructed memories and changed circumstances. But the variety of material has ultimately worked to enhance my understanding through its diversity of forms and complementarity of perspectives.

Published editions of women's writing from the Civil War era grow more numerous every year and greatly aided me in my task. The most compelling part of my research, however, was my visits to more than two dozen manuscript repositories, concentrated in eleven southern states and the District of Columbia, but including a number of Yankee institutions as well. My debt to all those who assisted me at those libraries and archives is incalculable.  

I have listened to the voices of more than 500 Confederate women. But my research extended well beyond the writings of the women themselves, for it was not just females who were worried about the changing nature of identity and of gender relations in the wartime South. White women's self scrutiny engaged them in an ongoing conversation with the larger society of which they were a part, in a process of negotiation about what womanhood would come to mean in circumstances of dramatic social upheaval. As a result, I have directed considerable attention to public discourse about gender and about woman's place in the new southern nation. Some of this discussion I have discovered in Confederate popular culture-in plays, novels, songs, and paintings. But I have also found it closely associated with political dimensions of southern life-in remarks by leading southern statesmen such as Jefferson Davis, in newspaper editorials, and even in public policy decisions.

Existing studies of Confederate politics and public life have paid almost no attention to the place of women, either as targets of policies or as influences on them. I hope to show in this book that not only did leaders of Confederate opinion and government talk about the proper place of white women in both the new nation and the war to secure its independence; they executed plans and passed legislation that had direct effects on women's lives. Whether or not Confederate leaders recognized these implications, Confederate women certainly did. In a nation rent by war and invasion, there are no private lives. Women's evaluations of the southern government's policies on conscription, relief, home defense, economic production, and slavery influenced and,I argue, in the end undermined women's support for continued war.

Public discussion and public actions affected as well the ways in which women revised their identities and reinvented themselves amidst warborn social transformation. The experiences of my own youth have not permitted me to forget how the disruption of prevailing public values can create the opportunity for new choices within the seemingly most private aspects of individual lives. Yet, as we shall see, the tenacious hold of traditionalism can combine ultimately to restrict these choices as well. This book is about the clash of old and new within the lives of a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South; it is about the paradox of being at once privileged and subordinated; it is about how people manage both to change and not change, about the relationship of such personal transformations to a larger world of society and politics. It is about the half of the Confederacy's master class that was female.

Wellfleet, August 1994