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  • Mary Elizabeth Massey:Standing with the Master Class
  • Thavolia Glymph (bio)

Mary Elizabeth Massey is often described as a “moderate,” moderate in her approach to women’s history, moderate in her thinking about women’s rights, moderate in her stance on the place of women in the historical profession.26 Moderation in all things favored her struggle to win admission to the predominantly white male historical fraternity, as did no doubt her studied unconcern for analytical, interpretative scholarship. “All her professional life,” Barbara Bellows writes, “Massey had been smiling and pushing.” It is thus not surprising to find her advising a young woman scholar that the best strategy for making her way in the profession was to ‘smile sweetly and push them against the wall,’ even as she publicly claimed that gender distinctions had not marred her professional life.27 The wall, it turns out, Massey herself helped to maintain.

Massey is considered a pioneer in the history of southern women, but only some southern women merited her gaze. These were women she admired, women she believed deserved, like her, a place in history for their individual accomplishments. Massey took on the hugely important task of telling the story of Confederate women in the Civil War and could be at times a critical, if cautious and tentative, narrator.28 There were also places she simply would [End Page 412] not go or where she would go only so far. She had little to say about black women, and when she did, she frequently and often unabashedly embraced dominant racist tropes.

Black women and children, of course, made up a large proportion of southern refugees and the majority of southern women refugees. But in none of Massey’s three books and several articles on the home front would she find space to accommodate their story in any significant way. Their invisibility in the images that accompany her work except as slaves accompanying white women refugees is striking. The little she did say, however, reveals the breadth of her unconcern. While she acknowledged that black women refugees “died of exhaustion, exposure, or foul play,” she assured her readers that they should take this with a grain of salt, for black women “were also brutal.” Following Mary Chesnut, Massey rehashed rumors that black women, by the “hundreds,” “abandoned or killed their children along the line of march rather than be slowed down by them.” Simply put, she concludes: “Many negro women were indifferent to their own children.” They “might bring children into the world,” she asserted, “but few were trained to raise them properly, for Negro mothers had been childishly dependent on whites and were naïve and confused.”29 In this way, Massey undercut black women’s struggles as refugees and their claims to freedom and the rights of citizenship.

Massey explained the exclusion this way: she had originally intended, she wrote, “to include all groups uprooted by the war—Confederate and Union sympathizers, Negroes, Indians, and whites, and those who left the South as well as those who tried to remain within Confederate lines.” But on the advice of “several authorities,” she concluded that such a study would require volumes and decided to focus on “Confederate sympathizers who spent the war trying to stay within the contracting Confederacy. All other displaced people are brought into the story only when they touch Confederate refugees in some way.”30

Her use of the phrase “Confederate sympathizers” to mean “Confederates” is a problem, but there are also other pressing questions. Given the centrality [End Page 413] of slaves to southern society and to the lives of white refugees, they could not but “touch” Confederate refugees not sometimes, “in some way,” but nearly always, in every way. In Refugee Life in the Confederacy, Massey devotes a great deal of space to reciting the reasons white women Confederates fled their homes; the scarcity of food, clothing, and shelter; and other problems they endured as refugees. Enslaved people’s wartime resistance—from running away and life as refugees to labor unrest and sabotage on the plantations and among urban areas—barely figure in these reasons.

In Massey’s analysis, when black people do “touch” white refugees, it...

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