The Crisis of Confederate Womanhood

Like the former sinner in “Amazing Grace,” the Civil War—at least from the vantage point of social historians—“once was lost but now is found.” Indeed, just a decade ago, Maris Vinovskis wondered if social historians despite an otherwise expanding field of vision—could find their way back to the sectional conflict. ¹ Now only the most die-hard military buffs can remain unaware of the transformation occurring in Civil War historiography. In analyzing a war that was fought largely by volunteers from both sections, by “ordinary” Americans who left behind families and friends whose support efforts were essential to battlefield successes, historians have gradually begun to fashion an understanding of the broader social dimensions that enveloped the military conflict. With this in mind, recent scholars have greatly enhanced our picture of the era of North-South aggression by studying attitudes of common soldiers, life on the homefront, and women’s experiences during the war.

In Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Drew Faust has not only strengthened the social historians’ position, she has also broken new ground in the study of the sectional conflict. Although hers is not the first study of women, or even of southern white women, in the war, hers is the first to offer some bold reassessments of how white southern females shaped the Confederate experience. Unlike earlier studies, Faust examines gender as much as she examines women and is thus able to ponder more deeply the ways in which the Confederacy confronted a gender crisis as it waged the war and attempted to preserve its bulwark institution of slavery. Along the way, she opens a fascinating window into the lives of southern women who saw their world turned upside down.

In part, Faust can more thoroughly probe the problem of gender because her book casts a relatively small net around its subject matter. Drawing on the records and writings of over 500 women, Faust examines a specific sector of southern white womanhood, the “women of the slaveholding South.” The actual text tends to concentrate even more specifically on women in the wealthier slaveowning families, an emphasis that is justified by Faust’s intention to study the southern ruling class in its “moment of truth” (p. xii). To some extent, Faust follows in the tradition of Anne Scott’s The Southern Lady (1970) by considering this most elite group of southern females. But unlike Scott Faust emphasizes the benefits over the burdens of wealthy southern women, especially the advantages they hoped to keep as a result of their slaveowning status. Thus, where Scott stressed the demanding and exhausting work routines of southern white women, Faust presents ladies who appeared ignorant of the most basic tasks on their plantations. Writing as part of the first wave of women’s history scholarship, Scott focused on women’s achievements in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Twenty-five years later, Drew Faust writes from a perspective that emphasizes the class and racial advantages that even women, notably white, upper-class women, have enjoyed.

Focusing on elite women and their privileges allows Faust to contemplate those with the most to gain, and perhaps the most to lose, by the Confederacy’s gamble. This gives Faust’s work a vantage point that previous studies of Confederate women have lacked. George Rable, Faust’s closest companion in terms of topic, examined white women, including those of the poor, yeomen, and slaveowning classes, in his work Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (1989). Rable provided tremendous breadth in his discussion of southern white women’s experiences, but his work occasionally suffered from taking too broad a perspective. Southern white women were, after all, deeply divided by their class and their slaveowning status. And, as Rable’s work shows, especially in the many reiterations of class distinctions among southern females, southern womanhood does not lend itself to...