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"...