Review: Mothers of Invention by Drew Gilpin Faust

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)
by Drew Gilpin Faust

A Review

 Groundbreaking (though not a flattering portrait) of White Elite Southern Women during the Civil War

This monograph, written by Harvard's first female president, offers a historical survey of elite Southern women during the Civil War as read through their letters, diaries, citywide decrees, women's societies, and a variety of other popular and legal sources.

The portrait is not flattering. Faust debunks the myth that many white Southern women centralized production in their homes (war "home-factories"), that they successfully made their own products (i.e., especially cloth), that they managed their plantations well, or that they significantly impacted nursing and other professions.

Essentially, Southern women subscribed to an ideology of helplessness and frailty that relied on white masculinity for its defense. They didn't *want*, for the most part, to be independent--they would have much rather preferred being protected and enclosed in the safe "hoop" of patriarchy.

The Civil War required them to step up into position of independence and assertiveness, and at first, women protested and withdrew. They could barely manage their slaves, resorted to impulsive, emotional outbursts, and otherwise failed (for the most part, though of course there are always exceptions) to transgress existing gender boundaries.

However, by the end of the war, elite white women were tired of relying on a white masculinity that seemed to be failing in protecting their identities. Bitter and disillusioned, they began tentatively constructing their own identities, but not as their "northern sisters" had: more out of spite and anger at conditions, their actions were rooted in the "distinctive" Southern "experience of poverty and failure"...

Review: Self-Taught by Heather Andrea Williams

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

by Heather Andrea Williams

A Review

Excellent descriptive work of African American education, but not powerfully interpretive 

This research is a much needed contemporary history of the education of African Americans in the South from slavery through reconstruction and the beginnings of the common (public) school. It addresses the question from the local, 'grassroots' perspective--Williams explores how blacks sacrificed to build schools, pay for teachers, advocate for their own education, and how these individuals striving for freedom inspired a movement for education across the South. Poor whites, seeing blacks entering schools, were driven to anger, jealousy, violence, and imitation. Some whites enrolled in freedpeoples schools, as they believed them superior to the poor white schools in the neighborhood (if there were any).

Williams' work could definitely use an update and a broadening of perspective. Her research is education-centric--she does not consider broader social forces at play in her analysis, or if she does, she brings them up for a paragraph before moving on. In other words, she does not string her analysis along broader themes of race/ism, freedom, democracy, etc, all at play during this period. Education was in fact the very foundation of new conceptions of democracy: it was foundational to the ideology of freedom, and it was not coincidental that freedpeople associated education with a way up in the world. They were in some ways appropriating a republican ideology of free labor that valued education as foundational.

By not considering the broader context--the North, the new forces of industrialization and the changing meaning of labor, contestations of freedom, and so on, Williams' point is less forceful, less connected. However, as descriptive work, and as *the* contemporary (21st century) work on the subject, this is definitely must-reading.