by Laura Montana

Created on: July 25, 2009   Last Updated: August 29, 2009

Gone With the Wind: The Sheltered Lives of the Southern Belle

As with all wars, the Civil War had a great impact on its soldiers and their families. The most obvious changes could be seen with the men killed in battle or dying of disease in the army camps or the countless thousands who were wounded and, for many, permanently disabled. Less apparent was how the war changed the lives of women. Once again, the deaths and injuries of the men in their lives was the most obvious example of their sacrifices, however, the war left significant and lasting changes in the way women of that era lived the rest of their lives and ultimately how their daughters and granddaughters gained greater freedom in theirs.

Economics, location, class, education, and color determined the type and degree of changes in women's lives. In some cases the well-to-do got richer and in others they became paupers. As Alexis Girardin Brown explains in the Michigan State University Press, many women stepped out of their sheltered existence voluntarily entering the public sphere and becoming pro active in dealing with men, for they now had the responsibility to protect and feed their families. All these women shared in one thing-surviving day-to-day without the traditional support of the men in their communities.

Of all the women in the United States none faced such monumental changes and loss as the women of upper-class Southern society. Mary Boykin Chestnut spoke for many women when she wrote in her journal, There are nights here with the moonlight cold and ghostly when I could tear my hair and cry aloud for all that is past and gone.

Women's Roles

Women had not yet won their fight for equal rights in the 1860s, and in fact had very few rights. The shortage of women in the American West served to place them in a position of more power than the women of any other area of the United States. The women in the North and East were making progress, slowly wresting free what was rightfully theirs. The women of the South, particularly the female slaves and paradoxically, the mistresses they served, lived with the least freedom of all.

In Southern society, a wife had no legal identity of her own and demanded women remain under the protection of a male relative and were counted with their husbands as one person under the law. In antebellum South, women were expected to be simplistic and submissive and were valued only as mothers and wives. Even the education of girls and young women was decided on the basis

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