Remember the Ladies: Ladies' Memorial Associations, the Lost Cause, and Southern Women's Activism

As memory studies gained currency in American history, historians of women and gender began to apply these insights to the study of women and memory. They especially turned to the role of white women and gender in the Lost Cause, the movement by Southerners to honor the Confederacy that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was not that long ago when historian Gaines Foster claimed that the Lost Cause was effectively over—no longer influential—when women took it over. Historians of women begged to differ. Karen Cox's excellent study of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) not only established the central role of white women in the Lost Cause, but also argued that the UDC's central purpose—and its power—came from the organization's turn from memorializing the dead to vindicating the Confederate cause; Francesca Morgan examined different groups of women, from the UDC to the DAR, and the many ways they enacted nationalism in their "everyday practice" even though they ceded formal political power (voting and office-holding) to men; Fitzhugh Brundage found that Southern white women created historical memory as part of their understanding of civilization and in the process created "cultural" authority for themselves; and my own study of black and white South Carolina women's clubs demonstrated just how pervasive the Lost Cause was, when white women's clubs overlapped with the more explicitly Lost Cause organizations like the UDC in their membership, activities, and rhetoric, and how the competing stories that white and black clubwomen told about Southern history reveal the making of a culture of segregation—and the protests against that culture.¹ So what is there for us to learn now about white women and memory in the New South from Caroline Janney? Janney's most important contribution to Lost Cause historiography is to re-examine just when women's role became crucial. She contends that rather than focusing on the 1890s with the rise of the UDC, historians need to understand that women were integral to the movement as early as 1865, immediately after the Civil War when Ladies' Memorial Associations began burying the dead. Her work shows just how far the field has come; with the broad strokes of the Lost Cause now understood, analysis of the nuances of chronology and organization provides new insights into the political meaning of memorialization activities.

Janney examines Virginia's Ladies' Memorial Associations from 1865 to 1915, and claims that they, not the UDC (nor the United Confederate Veterans), "were responsible for remaking military defeat into a political social, and cultural victory for the white South" (p. 3). She argues that this distinction between the LMAs and the UDC challenges the historiography of the Lost Cause by changing its chronology not just in that LMAs preceded the UDC and other organizations, but also because their temporary decline in activity in the late 1870s and 1880s belies the notion of the inexorable growth of the Lost Cause. Moreover, Janney insists that the turn from burying the dead to celebrating the Confederacy as outlined by Foster and Cox misses the profoundly political meaning of the memorial work of the LMAs. LMAs were never only about mourning the dead and providing proper gravesites, but from the beginning shared the political ideology ascribed by historians to later organizations like the UDC.

Southern women's historiography also benefits from Janney's understanding of white women's support for the Confederacy. Although Drew Faust cast women's loyalty into question, Janney, along several other historians, found evidence of their continued devotion to the cause.² She cites diaries and letters that stress middle- and upper-class Virginia women's continued support even as the end of the war grew near, in addition to the devotion after battles ceased. Janney makes a brief but interesting comparison between...