Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War

by Drew Gilpin Faust

Overview

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women’s lives became vexed and uncertain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807863329
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/09/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	326
Lexile:	1360L (what's this?)
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University. Her books include Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South, and This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University. Her books includeSouthern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War and The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: All the Relations of Life
Chapter One: What Shall We Do: Women Confront the Crisis
Chapter Two: A World of Femininity: Changed Households and Changing Lives
Chapter Three: Enemies in Our Households: Confederate Women and Slavery
Chapter Four: We Must Go to Work, Too
Chapter Five: We Knew Little: Husbands and Wives
Chapter Six: To Be an Old Maid: Single Women, Courtship, and Desire
Chapter Seven: An Imaginary Life: Reading and Writing
Chapter Eight: Though Thou Slay Us: Women and Religion
Chapter Nine: To Relieve My Bottled Wrath: Confederate Women and Yankee Men
Chapter Ten: If I Were Once Released: The Garb of Gender
Chapter Eleven: Sick and Tired of This Horrid War: Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Self-Interest
Epilogue: We Shall Never . . . Be the Same

Afterword: The Burden of Southern History Reconsidered
Notes
Bibliographic Note
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A captivating, richly researched, and elegantly written analysis of gender, race, and class at the crossroads of war and region by one of the finest historians of our generation. Drew Faust adroitly dissects the ambiguity and irresolution in the inner lives, thoughts, and experiences of elite white women who struggled to maintain status and privilege even as the necessities of Civil War transformed southern society.”—Darlene Clark Hine, editor of The Encyclopedia of Black Women’s History

“For well over a century, we have understood the deeds of Confederate women on the terms set by the Confederates themselves at the outset of the war. It took Drew Faust to break us out of this ancient history of virtues and sacrifices. Mothers of Invention is a transcendent book: It is fresh, insightful, compassionate, and daring.”—Suzanne Lebsock, author of The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860

“Drew Faust’s Mothers of Invention provides a fascinating analysis of how the Civil War at once subverted and reinforced traditional gender roles among southern women. Richly textured and immensely readable, this is a major book by a major historian.”—David Donald, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln

“Drew Gilpin Faust brings alive the voices and feelings of southern slaveholding women as they coped with the escalating changes—and frequent disasters—with which the Civil War transformed their lives. . . . An engaging narrative that demonstrates how fully this devastating war was, in fact, a story of and by women as well as men.”—Elizabeth Fox—Genovese, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South

“Drew Faust provides a welcome and stunning contribution to Civil War history. . . . Faust’s exhaustive evidence on everyday life and consciousness—religion, courtship, pregnancy, dress styles, and the complex but unraveling protocol of race and gender conventions—make this pathbreaking study a must—read in southern and women’s history.”—Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Professor of Afro—American Studies, Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

Faust's exceedingly readable volume may be considered a fine nonfiction companion to "Gone with the" "Wind" and Mary Chesnut's famous diary. It focuses on upper-class southern women, who before the Civil War had made a workable bargain with patriarchy: protection in return for limited spheres of free activity and competence. The war threw this bargain not merely into the melting pot but into the furnace, and such women were simultaneously faced with a broken contract, which they resented, and a series of challenges that many of them met as interestingly as Margaret Mitchell's heroine. Subsequently, the same women became the backbone of the effort to reimpose the prewar hierarchy of race and class. In addition to its rare readability, Faust's effort is full of insights and even wit. Altogether, it is one of the most admirable recent volumes of American social history.

Roland Green

“A captivating, richly researched, and elegantly written analysis of gender, race, and class at the crossroads of war and region by one of the finest historians of our generation. Drew Faust adroitly dissects the ambiguity and irresolution in the inner lives, thoughts, and experiences of elite white women who struggled to maintain status and privilege even as the necessities of Civil War transformed southern society.”—Darlene Clark Hine, editor of The Encyclopedia of Black Women’s History

“For well over a century, we have understood the deeds of Confederate women on the terms set by the Confederates themselves at the outset of the war. It took Drew Faust to break us out of this ancient history of virtues and sacrifices. Mothers of Invention is a transcendent book: It is fresh, insightful, compassionate, and daring.”—Suzanne Lebsock, author of The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860

“Drew Faust’s Mothers of Invention provides a fascinating analysis of how the Civil War at once subverted and reinforced traditional gender roles among southern women. Richly textured and immensely readable, this is a major book by a major historian.”—David Donald, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln

“Drew Gilpin Faust brings alive the voices and feelings of southern slaveholding women as they coped with the escalating changes—and frequent disasters—with which the Civil War transformed their lives. . . . An engaging narrative that demonstrates how fully this devastating war was, in fact, a story of and by women as well as men.”—Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South

“Drew Faust provides a welcome and stunning contribution to Civil War history. . . . Faust’s exhaustive evidence on everyday life and consciousness—religion, courtship, pregnancy, dress styles, and the complex but unraveling protocol of race and gender conventions—make this pathbreaking study a must-read in southern and women’s history.”—Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University

From the Publisher

1996 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Award, Commended
1997 Avery O. Craven Award, Winner
1997 Francis Parkman Prize, Winner
1996 Jefferson Davis Award, Winner
1997 New York Times Notable Book, Commended