Born into a male-dominated society, southern women often chose to support patriarchy and their own celebrated roles as mothers, wives, and guardians of the home and humane values. George C. Rable uncovers the details of how women fit into the South's complex social order and how Southern social assumptions shaped their attitudes toward themselves, their families, and society as a whole. He reveals a bafflingly intricate social order and the ways the South's surprisingly diverse women shaped their own lives and minds despite strict boundaries. Paying particular attention to women during the Civil War, Roble illuminates their thoughts on the conflict and the threats and challenges they faced and looks at their place in both the economy and politics of the Confederacy. He also ranges back to the antebellum era and forward to postwar South, when women quickly acquiesced to the old patriarchal system but nonetheless lived lives changed forever by the war.

Winner of the 1989 Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy, 1989. Winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians, 1991.| Cover Title Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Tradition, Change, and Uneasy Accommodation Chapter 2. Defenders of the Faith Chapter 3. The Civil War as Family Crisis Chapter 4. Southern Women and Confederate Military Power Chapter 5. The Political Economy of the Southern Home Front Chapter 6. The New Women of the Confederacy Chapter 7. Duty, Honor, and Frustration: The Dilemmas of Female Patriotism Chapter 8. The Coming of Lucifer's Legions Chapter 9. Refugees and Revelers Chapter 10. From Exaltation to Despair Chapter 11. Defeat Chapter 12. Reconstructing the Domestic Economy Chapter 13. The Janus-Faced Women of the New South Notes Bibliography of Manuscript Collections Index Back cover | Winner of the 1989 Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy, 1989 — Museum of the Confederacy
Winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians, 1991. — Southern Association of Women Historians
|George C. Rable is professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Alabama. His books include Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! and Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South.