Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (review)

Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. By Laura F. Edwards. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. x, 271. $29.95.)

Laura F. Edwards's Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a laudable effort to synthesize the growing literature on Southern women for a wide audience while showing "how the inclusion of women in the history of the nineteenth-century South changes our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction" (2). True to its purpose, this book will be of interest to non-specialists; its tantalizing references to provocative historical ideas will spark classroom discussions. Specialists will not find much new and may find grating the repeated and increasingly outdated assertion that historians focus on politics and the military, excluding women from the general historical narrative. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a history of Southern women who experienced the Civil War and the changes it dictated in Southern society.

Narrating a history of the lives of widely different groups of women over almost a century, Edwards combats chaos by organizing the book into units: Before, During, and After the war; elite whites; common whites; African Americans. This format is uncomfortably jumpy but a reasonable solution to the problem of such a sweeping narrative. More problematic is that the attempt to cover so much conflicting material obscures the book's explanatory framework. Seeing the household as the central institution of Southern society, Edwards maintains that domestic relations were tied to civil and political rights and illuminate women's political activism during the nineteenth century. "Before" emphasizes the social, economic, and political dependence of elite women on men. Poor white women and black women worked outside this nominal dependence, although their actions were circumscribed by society's concept of the male-centered household. "During" explores the initial support of elite women for the war as they identified their own interests with the Confederacy, then examines their disillusionment with the conflict as it ruined their families. Common white and black women turned against the war as it threatened their households; their opposition destroyed the Confederate war effort. "After" examines the efforts of common and African American women to obtain rights through political activism, labor insurgency, and cultural assertion, while elite white women "rebuilt their own racial and class identity around a particular kind of domesticity" (182). That domesticity denied rights to lower-class women at the same time that it freed elite women from complete subordination to the men emasculated by the war. "Everything had changed, and nothing had changed," Edwards concludes (185).

As she does here, Edwards asserted the centrality of the household in Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997), and legitimate disagreements remain about how completely the concept of the household explains women's experience in the Civil War era. While the antebellum Southern economy rested on the household and its disintegration destroyed women's support for the Confederacy, Edwards's own evidence emphasizes the importance of class in the construction of Southern women's identity. After the war, class and racial dynamics were paramount until women of the Progressive era asserted their political voice through a domestic ideal that itself enshrined race and class prejudices.

Surprisingly, considering its aim for comprehensiveness, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore does not discuss the role of disease in the lives of nineteenth-century Southern women, despite the fact that Southerners' understanding of disease bolstered the ideas that Edwards explores. "Neurasthenia" and reproductive problems helped to reinforce the dependency of elite women in antebellum years at the same time that the high rate of sudden infant death among the malnourished slave population reinforced the elite conviction that slave women were unfit mothers. The high mobility of wartime refugees exacerbated outbreaks of measles and other contagious diseases, bringing death to the home front and further weakening the common woman...