Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 154 dom, James Baldwin’s writings about his first encounter with the South, Tipper Aitcheson Gore’s mission to the homeless, Robert Howard Allen’s intellectual conversion, Professor C. Eric Lincoln’s novel The Avenue, Clayton City (New York, 1988), Palmer Gaillard’s amazing deathbed confession , and Robert Croshon’s farsighted vision have all left a lasting impression on Frye Gaillard and will impress readers as well. With Music and Justice for All is about life in the New South. This book will interest scholars and students of southern history, and Gaillard’s clear writing style makes the book easy to read. ELTON H. WEAVER III University of Memphis Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War. By Victoria E. Ott. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. xiii, 215 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8093-2828-4. Victoria Ott’s Confederate Daughters is a thoughtful and well-written study that fills in a piece of the puzzle of southern women’s experiences during the Civil War era. Building on the groundbreaking exploration of the lives of Confederate women by Drew Gilpin Faust, George Rable, and LeeAnn Whites, Ott asserts that young women who came of age during the war experienced the war and postwar period differently from their mothers. Though there were certainly many experiences these Confederate daughters and mothers shared, the daughters’ youth gave them different perceptions of the war as well as different opportunities and experiences. As Ott writes in her introduction, “it was through the lens of youth that [Confederate daughters] understood the Confederate cause” (p. 1). Ott also contributes to the historiographical debate over whether the war caused fundamental changes in the status and roles of southern women. She concludes that young women fought for the Confederate cause because they saw it as necessary to “protect the cultural script promised to them once they reached maturity” (p. 4). Their efforts in the name of Confederate nationalism, however, laid the groundwork for future change because it introduced them to “new worlds of community activism, domestic labor, and paid employment” (p. 167). Ott organizes her study chronologically, focusing on “common themes that defined [southern daughters’] experiences before, during, and after the war” (p. 12). Accordingly, she begins her study with an examination A P R I L 2 0 0 9 155 of the lives of young women before the war. After thoroughly establishing the prewar social, cultural, and domestic expectations of Southern daughters, Ott proceeds to the meat of her evidence. In a chapter entitled “the Politicized Belle,” Ott explores how coming of age during the Civil War affected Confederate daughters’ understanding of themselves and the South. According to Ott, “women coming of age in wartime found their own political voice. Their youth permitted a degree of freedom in their patriotic expressions much greater than that permitted their mothers and older female kin” (p. 36). Though southern daughters participated in relief societies and other community organizations alongside their mothers, “they engaged in their own community activities centered in their peer culture” (p. 51). In their efforts to support the Confederacy, they often transformed the normal pursuits of their prewar lives into political statements. Young women’s fashion, for example , became a means of expressing Confederate nationalism. Whether they were advocating the movement to homespun cloth, abandoning their hoop skirts, or wearing particular colors or specific flowers in their hair, young women expressed their commitment to the cause publicly through their clothing. The war also caused significant changes in the routine activities of young women’s lives. The rituals and traditions of courtship and marriage as well as young women’s roles within the home were transformed by the war. Moreover, “economic necessity propelled them into the southern workforce” (p. 74). For many Confederate daughters these changes were not necessarily welcome, but they accepted them as their duty and as sacrifices they must make for the sake of the Confederacy. Despite experiences of the young women during the war, according to Ott, they “failed to produce any fundamental change” in their postwar lives. Ott concludes her...