Gender is the last vantage point from which the Civil War has yet
to be examined in-depth, says LeeAnn Whites. Gender concepts and
constructions, Whites says, deeply influenced the beliefs
underpinning both the Confederacy and its vestiges to which white
southerners clung for decades after the Confederacy's defeat.
Whites's arguments and observations, which center on the effects of
the conflict on the South's gender hierarchy, will challenge our
understanding of the war and our acceptance of its historiography.
The ordering principle of gender roles and relations in the
antebellum South, says Whites, was a form of privileged white male
identity against which others in that society were measured and
accorded worth and meaning--women, wives, children, and slaves.
Over the course of the Civil War the power of these men to so
arbitrarily construct their world all but vanished, owing to a
succession of hardships that culminated in defeat and the end of
slavery. At the same time, Confederate women were steadily--and
ambivalently--empowered. Drawn out of their domestic sphere, these
women labored and sacrificed to prop up an apparently hollow notion
of essential manliness that rested in part on an assumption of
female docility and weakness. Whites focuses on Augusta, Georgia,
to follow these events as they were played out in the lives of
actual men and women. An antebellum cotton trading center, Augusta
was central to the Confederacy's supply network and later became an
exemplary New South manufacturing city. Drawing on primary sources
from private family papers to census data, Whites traces the
interplay of power and subordination, self-interest and loyalty, as
she discusses topics related to the gender crisis in Augusta,
including female kin networks, women's volunteer organizations,
class and race divisions, emancipation, Sherman's invasion of
Georgia, veteran aid societies, rural migration to cities, and the
postwar employment of white women and children in industry. Whites
concludes with an account of how elite white Augustans
"reconstructed" themselves in the postwar years. By memorializing
their dead and mythologizing their history in a way that presented
the war as a valiant defense of antebellum domesticity, these
Augustans sought to restore a patriarchy--however attenuated--that
would deflect the class strains of industrial development while
maintaining what it could of the old Southern gender and racial
order. Inherent in this effort, as during the war, was an unspoken
admission by the white men of Augusta of their dependency upon
white women. A pioneering volume in Civil War history, this
important study opens new debates and avenues of inquiry in culture
and gender studies.
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