Mothers of Invention : Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War

by Faust, Drew Gilpin

• ISBN13: 9780807855737
• ISBN10: 0807855731
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xv
Introduction. All the Relations of Life	3	(6)
What Shall We Do?: Women Confront the Crisis	9	(21)
A World of Femininity: Changed Households and Changing Lives	30	(23)
Enemies in Our Households: Confederate Women and Slavery	53	(27)
We Must Go to Work, Too	80	(34)
We Little Knew: Husbands and Wives	114	(25)
To Be an Old Maid: Single Women, Courtship, and Desire	139	(14)
An Imaginary Life: Reading and Writing	153	(26)
Though Thou Slay Us: Women and Religion	179	(17)
To Relieve My Bottled Wrath: Confederate Women and Yankee Men	196	(24)
If I Were Once Released: The Garb of Gender	220	(14)
Sick and Tired of This Horrid War: Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Self-Interest	234	(14)
Epilogue. We Shall Never . . . Be the Same	248	(7)
Afterword. The Burden of Southern History Reconsidered	255	(4)
Notes	259	(50)
Bibliographic Note	309	(4)
Index	313