Traditional histories about the Civil War often include the division between Northern and Southern identity throughout the conflict. This is especially true for social historians interested in researching the role of women during the Civil War, with many historians focusing on the characterization of Confederate women. The historiography of gender and the Civil War has consistently concerned itself with women’s experience while existing under the confines of patriarchy. The first major texts on gender analysis appeared following the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960’s. This period of feminism included understanding marginalization, leading to historians reflecting on the role of women during America’s most studied subjects. Early texts that include gender analysis of the Civil War possess more concern for interpreting the physical role of women, where it is a binary between women who participated on the battlefield and their domestic counterparts. These writings challenge assumptions of how women behaved during this time by exhibiting women’s defiance through their work on the battlefield and their ability to take over for their partners as breadwinners.
Moving into the 1980’s and 1990’s, social historians started to move away from women’s physical role during war to examine Southern women’s ideological role in upholding systems like Southern nationalism and White supremacy as means to protect their privilege. Especially following the success of Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber in 1992, numerous social histories on gender as a social construct during the Civil War emerged to discuss the larger cultural structures that affected Southern women’s place both on the battlefield and the homefront. Overall, this historiography is essential to understanding the cultural significance of gender in the South during the Civil War, which determined women’s status and behavior.
One of the earliest works on gender during this period is Women in the Civil War by Mary Elizabeth Massey, written in 1966. Massey’s writing demonstrates the influence of feminism on contextualizing gender roles during the war by critiquing “unfair” gender restrictions that impeded women’s educational and employment opportunities for both Northern and Southern women. These opportunities often encompassed domestic responsibilities- abundant openings for laundresses and cooks existed both before as well as during the war. Beyond her analysis of domestic work, Massey also acknowledges abolitionists and women who disguised themselves as men to join the war effort. This work overall does an excellent job of considering multiple perspectives, including women of color during the time.
Her portrayal of these women exudes second-wave feminism’s pursuit to challenge gender inequality in scholarship by focusing on individual narratives that give first-hand accounts of women throughout history. Massey frames much of her argument around women’s diaries and letters written from the Antebellum period to the start of Reconstruction, including popular figures like Dorothea Dix and Harriet Tubman. She uses individual stories to create lenses that discuss the gender-based discrimination and sexism that dictated women’s agency during that time.
Although Massey’s inclusion of various perspectives is one of the book’s positives, a criticism of Women in the Civil War includes the one-dimensional analysis of structural issues that contributed to women’s disenfranchisement. She goes into detail about the exceptional women that were able to defy gender restrictions, while overlooking the women that conformed due to societal pressure that defined their experiences. Her writing also often exudes White feminism’s disregard for the inherent racism exhibited by historical figures, allowing her readers to continue touting White women that perpetuated racial discrimination against their Black counterparts as “heroines” of the time. She often sympathizes with Confederate women and creates generalizations of women’s mentality throughout the war based on the individual diaries. In fact, she ignores the abuses perpetrated by Southern White women because she omits their participation in slave management. These complications influenced later social historians to examine the complexity of structures and ideology, rather than studying women using exceptionalist narratives.
Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism by George C. Rable in 1989 demonstrates the initial shift to ideological study by offering a perspective on how Southern women fit into Confederate politics and socioeconomics. His work directly contends Mary Elizabeth Massey’s insistence that the war affected both Northern and Southern women in the same manner through gendered work because he covers Southern women’s experience with slave labor. Rable’s characterization of Southern women includes the standardized family-oriented, politically engaged war enthusiast. These women remained devoted to the Confederacy as a means to protect their privilege based on structures like racism and classism.
Another difference between Civil Wars and its predecessors includes how generalized the women’s crusade for political agency has become throughout this historiography. Unlike some other historians that cite the Civil War as a “social revolution,” Rable expresses that war actually made women more likely to adhere to social conventions. They were forced to handle entire plantations by themselves and “take on the role of men.” He states that following the war, many women felt burdened by this responsibility left on them by both their husbands and the Confederacy. They returned to their previous conservatism once their husbands returned due to the psychological trauma of defeat, because it reminded them of the privileges they held before the war. In this way, gender roles are not seen as negative or restrictive. Instead, they provided women the opportunity to return to their former disengagement from politics.
Due to the sources used for studies about gender in the South coming from diaries and essays written by literate women, Rable’s book suffers from a focus on the elite. He does attempt to balance this deficit by including letters to the Confederate War Department that introduce lower-class women’s perspective on needing financial help following their husbands’ departures. These letters expose a larger issue of class difference throughout the region that also encouraged Southern nationalism. The Southern elite were fighting for their authority over both enslaved Blacks and poor Whites, which left many lower-class individuals feeling that war was “senseless” for them. Therefore, Rable’s book demonstrates that the war affected the overarching Southern class structure, as much as it affected individual Southern families. This work leads to social historians in the 1990’s studying how maintaining systems of class and racial oppression explain the Southern elite’s privilege.
A central book in analyzing systemic oppression includes Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber’s 1992 work, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. The book is a series of eighteen essays written by academics that reflect on primary sources, including diaries and court records. The book is structured to compare masculinity to femininity, offering a more well-rounded consideration of the relationship between gender and war. Throughout the book, the various scholars question the long term effects of gender politics on wartime political and social agency. Clinton and Silber intend for Divided Houses to be an open-ended resource that encourages other historians to conduct further study on gender as a social construct. Therefore, the essays are not conclusive on the subject. They are instead a starting point for interpreting gendered attitudes and behaviors during the war period.
Divided Houses is promoted as an essential work on the subject due to its backing by historians like James McPherson, who states in the book’s foreword that it “marks the full coming of age of social history for the Civil War era.” This work separates itself from prior scholarship by introducing topics that progress analysis of the intersection between race and gender in the South. For instance, “The Southern Homefront” section includes an essay by Peter Bardaglio on a mistress who refuses to let an enslaved teenage girl visit her Union enlisted father. This story represents the lack of protection for young Black women in the South due to institutional dehumanization by their White owners. The inclusion of younger women in this characterization of the South is a modern take in 1992, as many other historians at the time focus on adults because of the sources available. Bardaglio does mention that he has to make many inferences when discussing adolescents, because the war may not have affected them in the same way. However, he is able to assume based on the letters left either by their parents or once they grew to adulthood how war affected their experiences.
An obvious connection between early themes present in the historiography and Bardaglio’s essay consists of Southern White women’s complexity as figures who subvert the oppressive patriarchal structure through their positions as plantation leaders, while participating in the disenfranchisement of other women. Especially for White women, their gender identity often conflicted with their racial identity in terms of allowing one to retain their privilege while using the other to assert their autonomy. The problem with feminism exhibited by Southern White elite is that it lacks intersectionality. Therefore, these women were not fighting for gender equality, they were fighting for the same power denied to them by their White husbands due to their gender identity.
This characterization is also true of Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War four years later in 1996. However, Faust’s account reflects earlier second-wave feminism’s sympathy toward the Southern elite, similar to Massey’s Women in the Civil War. Faust mentions her choice to study slave-holding women is based on their “extensive record of self-justification as well as introspection.” Her bibliography shows a concerted effort to include as many personal memoirs as possible, with diaries and letters from over five hundred Southern women. This account of the Southern elite deals with the changes to traditional hierarchy throughout the South due to women’s newfound self-awareness.
Faust argues that the responsibility of slave management facilitated the most change in women’s political and occupational ideology. The change in breadwinner status challenged prior ideas about women’s submissiveness and subordination, because they were now in a place to make decisions that would affect their plantations going forward. Managerial status also impacted Southern women’s agency outside of the home through their campaign for public policy. For instance, female fundraisers lobbied for their monetary contributions to be spent on better protection for their properties, rather than funneling it back into the Confederate government. Overall, Faust’s book defines Southern women by their self-determination and depicts their interest in manifesting political influence through their privilege as admirable.
It is interesting to note the binary between modern social histories that dismiss White women’s role in upholding systemic racism, versus the ones that offer critique and challenge White feminism as a proponent of racist ideology. A leading example of confronting the White elite’s place in systems of oppression is Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber’s follow-up to Divided Houses in 2006, Battle Scars: Gender And Sexuality in the American Civil War. This work is also a collection of essays that evaluate the war’s effect on gender expression and ideology. It continues the conversation started in Divided Houses by providing new meaning to issues like performing gender and sexual power dynamics. Clinton and Silber again demonstrate an aptitude for arranging writings that expand the public’s contextualization of nineteenth century gender relations.
Battle Scars continues its predecessor’s depiction of White women’s self-interest in their own advancement, while denying that same authority to people of color. However, instead of focusing on plantation life and married women, the book includes an essay by Virginia Gould on Catholic nuns who participated in similar gender politics. Before this book, the historiography of Southern women in the Civil War focused on marriages because they clearly demonstrate women in opposition to patriarchy within their relationships. As women that did not have male partners, the intersectionality between religion and gender allowed Catholic nuns to transform their religious doctrine of self-determination into a social movement about women’s agency. These women also participated in racism through their missionary belief that Blacks needed religion to conform to social order. This story is important to the larger discussion of characterizing Southern women because it retires the exhausted narrative of plantation wives being the main source of women’s mobilization and racism during the war- this history includes many other types of women that should be covered.
Although thematic social histories are essential to considering gender dynamics during the Civil War, general histories also play a role in characterizing the Southern Lady. Throughout time, general historians have consistently discussed slave-holding women in relation to Southern politics. For instance, James Mcpherson is revered for his Pulitzer Prize winning work Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era in 1998, which includes examining women’s sphere of influence in the home both before and during the war. He mentions early on in his work that many women idealized domestic life and motherhood. Therefore, his portrayal of Southern women conforms to the conventions of the time in which the book was published. It shares elements with Women in the Civil War, where McPherson looks particularly at the physical role of women, rather than going in depth with women’s place in systemic oppression.
Unfortunately, these superficial explanations of women during the Civil War do not change with more contemporary work. An example of a considerable resource on Civil War history includes Bruce Levine’s 2012 book, The Fall of the House of Dixie. Levine includes letters written by women throughout the book to analyze changes in Southern politics and class differences. However, he treats women in that same domestic focus that ignores the complexity of gender during the time. He chooses to set up the same binary that looks at women on the battlefield versus the ones on the homefront, as many of the other books throughout this historiography do. These women are evaluated based on their contribution to the war’s labor force, rather than their ideological influence over Southern society. These kind of depictions do not portray women’s autonomy or their newfound self-determination that change gender politics during the Civil War.
The Southern Lady in Civil War history consistently exhibits contention between tradition and progress, both within the individual texts and throughout the collective historiography. Early texts on women’s place in the Confederacy put more effort into demonstrating their exceptionalism or their contribution to the war effort through physical labor. This same idea is reflected in general histories on the Civil War, and preserves the characterization of the Southern Lady as a superficial employee of Southern nationalism. These texts also continue the marginalization of Black women as figures in the Confederacy, often citing it as a “lack of resources.” It is not until more contemporary works come out that a complete discussion of multiple types of women, including women of color, forms to discuss intersectionality and systemic oppression. Even then, these texts are not definitive studies of gender and the Civil War. Rather, they are a starting point for further analysis that will lead to a balanced account of both women’s physical and ideological roles during war.