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

When Confederate men marched off to battle, white women across the South confronted unaccustomed and unsought responsibilities: directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive enslaved people. As southern women struggled "to do a man's business," they found themselves compelled to reconsider their most fundamental assumptions about their identities and about the larger meaning of womanhood. In this volume, the author offers a picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis.