Home Front Snapshots: Mary Elizabeth Massey’s Ersatz in the Confederacy’s Photographs and the Model Southern Woman

The photographs that grace the pages of Mary Elizabeth Massey’s Ersatz in the Confederacy caught the attention of a New York Times reviewer, whose 1952 review praised the decision to illustrate this scholarly historical work with pictures of a “pretty Southern girl.” Because he considered the attractive woman “cheering,” the reviewer expected the book to be popular with a wide audience.⁴⁸ But the pictures of this model also draw connections between the Civil War home front and contemporary memory. The images brought to mind the World War II home front, when the concept of ersatz was familiar to American housewives searching for substitutes, as well as to the Cold War, during which women’s function as consumers who maintained the domestic space was seen as patriotic.⁴⁹ The Times’s reviewer applauded the traditional vision of femininity preserved in the book’s photographs—at a time when some women had begun to chafe at its limitations.

The model, name unknown, displays a fancy straw hat from the Museum of the Confederacy’s collection. Behind her is a door in the Confederate White House. The homespun dress she wears in each of the photographs is not authenticated as a Civil War–era dress, according to the museum’s provenance notes. This and all images that follow are from Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952).

The model holds up slippers made from upholstery fabric and worn by Jefferson Davis. Confederate candles are arranged on the table next to her.

Massey chose nine photographs to illustrate her work on Confederate women’s ingenuity in the face of wartime shortages; six of them feature the same model. As if in a store catalog, she displays examples of what Massey calls ersatz, or substitutions women made to get by in wartime, from the Museum of the Confederacy’s collection. These include a fancy hat made of straw, a pair of slippers made of upholstery fabric, and a dress made of homespun cloth. The model, an attractive white woman, is safely ensconced at “home,” surrounded by objects that attest to her sacrifice and her ingenuity. Her hairstyle, makeup, and earrings are 1950s-era rather than 1860s, so she visually blends two periods into one concept of womanhood—the ideal housewife. She evinces none of the stress and strain that weighed heavily on women during the war and threatened to end the Confederate war effort. She makes a particularly good cover for Massey, who, as discussed above, worked hard to be nonthreatening and avoided making waves in a profession that still routinely denied women and African Americans entry—and those who, like Massey, managed to get in, the respect and positions they earned.

This photograph is the frontispiece for Ersatz in the Confederacy. Slaves made the uniform and shoe pictured here.

Here, the model enacts playing a game with cards—brought through the blockade— that feature Confederate generals. She seems relaxed rather than under the strain of wartime shortages.

The photographs in Ersatz in the Confederacy, like Massey’s text, present a vision of white southern womanhood that ignores the complexities of race and class divisions that cut deeply into the southern home front and weakened it.⁵⁰

Massey found support for her Lost Cause heroine narrative in the Confederate Museum in Richmond, Virginia, which opened in 1896. The Confederate Memorial Literary Society, an organization made up of Richmond’s elite women, which shared members and goals with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, worked to preserve Confederate relics and influence public memory of the Confederacy with the museum.⁵¹ They claimed authority over Confederate history and promoted the Lost Cause as an antidote to the industrialization and northern influence in the New South.⁵² Massey was familiar with the museum’s collection, as throughout Ersatz she cites its...