Disunited Daughters of the Confederations: Creoles and Canadians at the Intersection of Nations, States, and Empires

This article compares and connects the experiences of Creole and Canadian women as they became Americans and French Canadians during the Civil War era. Demographically and politically minoritized in Louisiana and Canada by the Anglo-Saxon race, Francophones engaged in the period between 1830 and 1890 in processes of collective refashioning such as nationalism and creolism that were deeply ingrained in the construction of gender identities. There was a fundamental contradiction between women's roles as mothers of a French race in North America and the fact that they were unsovereign. Gendered conflicts were triggered by different conceptions of homeland that changed the practices of everyday life: going to school, socializing, marrying, praying, deciding where to stay. Belonging to groups of colonized colonizers, these white women questioned their sense of self as they were torn between the United States, Canada, France, Great Britain and the Confederacy.