Volume 43, Number 8 · May 9, 1996
Home Fires
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust
University of North Carolina Press, 326 pp., $29.95
Thirty-five years ago, a serious study of women in the American South would probably have been ignored. In the early 1960s, Anne F. Scott's classic, The Southern Lady, was practically the sole work on the subject to receive any notice at all. As the centennial of the Civil War approached, no one seemed interested in what had happened to women during that war. In 1960 David Donald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for biography that year, proclaimed that nothing new remained to be said about the great conflict anyhow.[1] Even as feminism grew more insistent in the late 1960s, the ways that Southern women, white or black, had affected the history of the region were barely noticed. Most historical accounts were concerned with Northern women who advocated women's rights as well as the liberation of slaves, causes that enlisted only a handful of Southerners of either sex. (The exception, of course, was Edmund Wilson's essay on Mary Chesnut in Patriotic Gore.)
Review, 4288 words
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