Stepdaughters of History

Southern Women and the American Civil War

Catherine Clinton

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780807164594
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In Stepdaughters of History, noted scholar Catherine Clinton reflects on the roles of women as historical actors within the field of Civil War studies and examines the ways in which historians have redefined female wartime participation. Clinton contends that despite the recent attention, white and black women's contributions remain shrouded in myth and sidelined in traditional historical narratives. Her work tackles some of these well-worn assumptions, dismantling prevailing attitudes that consign women to the footnotes of Civil War texts.Clinton highlights some of the debates, led by emerging and established Civil War scholars, which seek to demolish demeaning and limiting stereotypes of southern women as simpering belles, stoic Mammies, Rebel spitfires, or sultry spies. Such caricatures mask the more concrete and compelling struggles within the Confederacy, and in Clinton's telling, a far more balanced and vivid understanding of women's roles within the wartime South emerges. New historical evidence has given rise to fresh insights, including important revisionist literature on women's overt and covert participation in activities designed to challenge the rebellion and on white women's roles in reshaping the war's legacy in postwar narratives. Increasingly, Civil War scholarship integrates those women who defied gender conventions to assume men's roles—including those few who gained notoriety as spies, scouts, or soldiers during the war.As Clinton's work demonstrates, the larger questions of women's wartime contributions remain important correctives to our understanding of the war's impact. Through a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of sex and race, Stepdaughters of History promises a broader conversation in the twenty-first century, inviting readers to continue to confront the conundrums of the American Civil War.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. See http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/recounting-the-dead/#more-105317; see also J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead” in Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011).

2. http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/06/thanks_a_lot_ken_burns.single.html.

6. Catherine Clinton, “Noble Women as Well,” in Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

7. Although recent prohibitions concerning the Confederate flag may dampen this market—or raise the price, if they become collectors’ items.

8. Coedited with Nina Silber.

9. See Catherine Clinton, ed., Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: An African American Woman’s Civil War Memoir, by Susie King Taylor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), and Catherine Clinton, Civil War Stories, Averitt Lecture Series, Georgia Southern University (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

10. See http://rebeldocumentary.com/about/the-film.

11. It is wonderful to see Carol Bleser’s significant series, Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South, continue at the University of South Carolina Press under the leadership of Melissa Walker and Giselle Roberts. These and other primary source projects stimulate rising generations of scholars in this field.

CHAPTER ONE

1. Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville, 1995); see chap. 5, “The Cult of Sacrifice.”

2. I thank the anonymous reader at LSU Press who generously provided critical suggestions, including this particular image of Chesnut.

3. Clinton, Tara Revisited, 64.

4. Ibid.

5. See Leigh Fought, Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord, 1810–1879 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), and Drew Gilpin Faust, introduction to Macaria, by Augusta Jane Evans (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992).

6. See Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1966), and “Historians Forum: Bonnet Brigades at Fifty: Reflections on Mary Elizabeth Massey and Gender in Civil War History,”Civil War History 61, no. 4 (December 2015).

7. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 85.

8. Daniel Stowell, “A Family of Women and Children,” in Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South, ed. Catherine Clinton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 166.

9. See Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). My own work suggests that more women continued the precedent set by plantation mistresses to manage households and estates (in the absence of husbands, brothers, or fathers), and this role was altered dramatically as they contemplated that these male family members might never return, so the burdens were more psychological than managerial. I argue that the majority were skilled at the job of keeping the home fires burning even before war erupted. See Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982). This view is compatible with the findings of Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), among others. Interpretations over the meaning of planters’ wives’ roles—in terms of labor, management, and impact on the plantation economy and slaveholding—continues a topic of heated debate.

10. Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 111.

11. Sallie Moore, Memories of a Long Life in Virginia (Staunton, VA: McClure Co., 1920), 70.

12. Louisa Henry to her mother, March 28, 1864, Arcadia, Mississippi, Boddie Family Papers, Mississippi State Archives, Jackson, MS.

13. Quoted by Stephanie McCurry in “Steel Magnolias,” a review of Faust’s Mothers of Invention, and LeeAnn Whites’s The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, in the Women’s Review of Books 14, no. 6 (March 1997): 13–14.

14. See LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009).

15. Mary Ann Huff, “The Role of Women in Confederate Georgia” (master’s thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1967), 72.

16. Clinton, Tara Revisited, 123.

17. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 8.

18. Ibid., 3.

19. Ibid., 42.

20. Her claim remains relatively unchallenged and is bolstered by evidence drawn from several hundred manuscript collections.

21. See newer interpretations of Confederate women which demonstrate alternate views, for example, Kristen Cree Brill, “Rewriting Southern Womanhood in the American Civil War” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2013).

22. For perhaps the most explicit refutation of this thesis, see Gary Gallagher’s The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

23. See, e.g., Victoria Bynum’s The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which illuminates the ways in which defiance also shaped the South during the Rebellion.

24. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Stephanie McCurry’s Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) suggests that yeomen’s rule over their own households was a primary source of their power within the Old South. See also “The Civil War as a Household War,” a forthcoming anthology edited by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites.

25. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, expands and extends a thesis developed by Emory M. Thomas more than forty years ago in The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1970; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992).

26. Several critics have taken McCurry to task for not defining more clearly “the state” in her book: Does she mean an individual state, such as South Carolina, or the Confederate national government or some other interpretation? Lockean? Foucault’s proclamation of the state as abstraction? She is pointedly fluid but always purposeful in arguing her case. The ambiguity of her use of the term “state” (as well as “project” and “citizen”) allows her an elasticity that is both frustrating and admirable.

27. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 203.

28. Ibid., 156.

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