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  • Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War
  • David Greenspoon
Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War. Victoria E. Ott. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8093-2828-4, 215 pp., cloth, $29.95.

In Confederate Daughters, Victoria E. Ott examines the experiences of adolescent white women in the American South during the Civil War and their [End Page 112] distinct role after the conflict in fabricating the Lost Cause myth. While historians have previously looked at white women from slaveholding households, Ott offers a new perspective by focusing on a specific age group. Using the letters, diaries, and memoirs of eighty-five white women aged twelve to eighteen from slaveholding families in diverse regions of the South, the author convincingly argues that young women responded to and understood the conflict differently than their elders; they also uniquely contributed to the Confederate war effort.

Ott argues that adolescent women coming of age during the war had little memory of a stable South, unlike members of their mothers’ generation. Consequently, they imagined an idealized Old South that never existed. Ott highlights how these young women’s outlooks were shaped by their church, school, and family experiences. For them, supporting southern secession and the war effort meant restoring a past they romanticized, built on rigid gender divisions and enslaved African Americans. In their efforts to realize this conservative goal they sacrificed their material comforts and assumed new responsibilities both inside and outside the home for the war effort; as plantation mistresses took on new administrative responsibilities in the household, young unmarried women assumed the work that their mothers no longer had time to perform. Indeed, these plantation households faced new wartime challenges as they experienced shortages, witnessed their slaves running to union lines, or became refugees.

Ott does not confine her study to the work of adolescent women during the War; she also pays considerable attention to the Civil War’s effect on adolescent courtship and marriage. Young women commonly had to delay their wedding plans until their soldier beaux returned. Others married under more austere circumstances than they expected, on account of wartime scarcity. At the same time, Ott argues, the war allowed young women to wrest some control over their romantic relationships from their parents. After the war, southern courtship and marriage remained affected by the conflict, as widespread poverty forced southern women to accept simple ceremonies, and the number of war casualties compelled young women to be less selective when choosing mates.

Ott argues in the final chapter that these women contributed to the Lost Cause myth in unique ways because they took on roles distinct from their mothers during and after the war. After the war, these women eulogized a past they never experienced in adulthood and lamented that the Confederacy [End Page 113] had failed at restoring a plantation society. For instance, women who went through adolescence during the Civil War wrote literature after the conflict that romanticized the southern belle waiting for her young soldier beau to return home.

Confederate Daughters is well written and offers some intriguing findings, demonstrating why these women supported the War and what was at stake for them. However, as a small point of criticism, Ott’s work may have benefited had the author considered Amy Murrell Taylor’s examination of divided loyalties in Civil War era courtships, though it may have appeared in print late in the writing process (The Divided Family in Civil War Era America, 2005). On the whole though, Confederate Daughters adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War South by forcing the reader to more closely consider how age affected the experiences of the women during and after the conflict, and it more broadly highlights how age is an important category of analysis.

David Greenspoon
Pennsylvania State University
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