Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War by Catherine Clinton (review)

Ever since she published The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South in 1982, historian Catherine Clinton has been tearing down the myths that obscure the history of Southern women. More than a dozen books later, Clinton’s Step-daughters of History is the latest salvo in her larger “project of historical renovation” (xvii). Originally delivered as the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, the volume creatively blends a retelling of the past with historiographic and biographic insights. As a result, it is both a window into the academic past and an intellectual roadmap to the future.

Southern women have long been mainstays of Civil War historiography. Yet, as Clinton notes, “women have been most broadly accepted and integrated into [Civil War and women’s history] by way of those women who achieved notoriety by male standards of accomplishment” (xvii). This volume promotes the past generation of scholars who have shown how women shaped the Civil War South through both traditional and nontraditional avenues. In its three sections, Stepdaughters of History breaks down specific myths and rescues the real people who have been obscured by them.

In “Band of Sisters” Clinton illuminates how elite women turned the Civil War into a morality play in which white Confederates—men and women—played the leading role. Through memoirs, wartime diaries, and novels, Southern white women rewrote the narrative of the Civil War and thereby created a “culture of deceit” that romanticized the Old South. They also helped create and solidify “an intense strain of sisterhood” that stressed white women’s shared experiences and sacrifices during the Civil War (2, 19). Clinton highlights Mary Boykin Chesnut’s pivotal part in creating and disseminating the Lost Cause mythology. Chesnut, who painstakingly rewrote her diary for public consumption to show herself in a positive light as well as to unite others around the Lost Cause, did not act in isolation. Clinton stresses that Chesnut’s “diary’s survival and publication was part of the collective work of nineteenth-century southern white women to preserve and promote their sisters who suffered and died too soon—before their stories were shared and praises might be sung” (37).

In “Impermissible Patriots,” Clinton rescues from ignominy some well-known Southern women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the army or who served as spies and smugglers. Through the example of female soldier and author Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Clinton illuminates how nineteenth-century and modern-day men use sexual slurs to discredit women who ignored traditional boundaries in order to aid the Confederacy. Both Gen. Jubal Early and historian William C. Davis, for example, branded Velazquez a liar, a fake, and a prostitute. Clinton powerfully berates these “male authorities” who “feel quite confident in taking this tactic to undermine a woman who was so audacious as to take a defiant position and then to advertise her perversion” (50). The memory of Velazquez suffered in comparison with the reputations of women who glorified men’s roles on the battlefield and engaged in “permissible patriotism” such as sewing societies and nursing. Those who acted within the constraints of respectability formed the more acceptable “band of sisters” of the earlier section. Clinton urges future scholars to “reframe and recast Confederate women’s defiant careers in more balanced terms, in order to recognize women who seized the opportunity to serve their country—their country right or wrong” (74).

In “Mammy by Any Other Name,” Clinton further emphasizes how myths have diminished the memory of Southern women—especially African American women. In this section, Clinton shows how the image and language of the Mammy has obscured the participation of most enslaved African American women in the wartime South. Clinton proclaims that scholars must continue to recognize and explore the varied experiences of enslaved women like Harriet Tubman and Susie King Taylor. Clinton dissects the Mammy myth as something whites...