First published 2012
Drew Gilpin Faust examines more than half a million women from Confederate slaveholding families who faced unprecedented challenges when war transformed their world. These women suddenly found themselves managing plantations and farms, caring for families alone, and controlling increasingly rebellious enslaved people. Faust focuses on their fierce hostility toward occupying Union forces. The women engaged in daily confrontations, acts of violence, murder, and espionage against Yankee soldiers in their communities. Their resistance created a fundamental conflict with the genteel ideals of white Southern womanhood they had been raised to embody. The war forced them to choose between passive femininity and active defiance. This UNC Press Short, drawn from Faust's larger work on Confederate women, reveals how crisis reshaped gender roles and social expectations in the slaveholding South.
Genres: biography, american-civil-war, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, american, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: gender-roles, resistance
Setting: Confederate States of America, Union
Period: American Civil War
69 pages · Kindle Edition · The University of North Carolina Press
Content warnings: slavery, violence