The Strange Careers of Elite Women in the New South

Jane Turner Censer. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2003. 336 pp. Halftones, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Jane Turner Censer investigates the complex responses of elite Southern white women to the devastation of war and the rise of the New South, correcting depictions of these women as ardent Confederate sympathizers, clinging desperately to the "Lost Cause" and the racial and sexual prerogatives it offered them.¹ While many scholars have focused on white women in the antebellum and Civil War South, no full-length study has described these same women after Appomattox. Consequently, historians know little about their ordinary reactions to the profound dislocations that followed the war. In The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, Censer argues that the Civil War permanently transformed many Southern ladies into independent women with previously unthinkable goals and desires. She also contends that some privileged women questioned the South's emerging racial order, a provocative if not entirely convincing point that deserves further investigation.

Censer focuses on women in North Carolina and Virginia, two states that allow her to generalize persuasively about the South as a whole. While Virginia, home to the capital of the Confederacy, saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war, battles barely scathed North Carolina's soil. But both states lost large numbers of men, a fact that had enormous consequences for women once the fighting ceased. Containing industrial, cotton- and rice-producing, and mixed farming regions, the two states were also microcosms of the broader Southern economy. Censer examines the "old elite" of these regions, including members of leading slaveholding families such as the descendents of Chief Justice John Marshall in Fauquier County, Virginia. This emphasis is understandable, not only because of the limited sources available to scholars but also because of the social realities of the time. As Censer notes, elite women's "education and status gave them chances denied to others" (p. 3-4). In other words, these former belles were the women most likely to exploit the era's new possibilities and best able to challenge the stifling conventions of the past.

After the war, elite women forged new skills that enabled them to support themselves and their families. Fearing for the future in economic hard times, parents emphasized their daughters' educations. Though financial losses often made private schools or tutors impossible, many former slaveholders taught their young children at home and even took advantage of new public schools. Many such daughters later pursued careers in teaching. Censer sees these decisions as more than economic exigency; she argues that women "saw teaching not only as a temporary expedient but as a long-term solution to the question of how they would support themselves and what they wished to do with their lives" (p. 182). Once in the public sphere, privileged women embraced their identity as educators, founding academies and teaching in public and private schools throughout the nation. Some of these women, Censer writes, even moved into higher education by attending or teaching at the new normal schools springing up in the South.

Censer also shows women's increasing autonomy as citizens, homemakers, property owners, and authors. While most historians view women's involvement in memorializing the Civil War as further evidence of their commitment to the Old South, Censer argues that the Ladies Memorial Associations (LMAs) show women actively shaping their communities. By emphasizing the ladies' symbolic responsibility—the placement of wreaths on soldiers' graves— previous scholars neglect their work in establishing the cemeteries themselves and then re-interring Confederate dead. According to Censer, it was only in the 1890s that women became mere symbols for the memorializing efforts of men.

Similarly, Censer understands the "new domesticity" not as a withdrawal into the private sphere after the upheaval of war, but as battle for "mastery" over a contested arena (p. 90). Censer describes how elite...