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 of what would be best for the men who dictated their lives. Upper-class white men began to find simple domestic women boring, and so girls classes in school expanded to include math, Greek, and Latin, thus enabling them to be interesting conversationalists. These extra classes benefited the girls in other ways, of course, but it seems there were few limits to what demands could be placed on women and fewer opportunities for women to unburden themselves of those demands. Proper ladies only engaged in pursuits considered to be feminine and appropriate and always avoided any interest or behavior that could render them unmarriageable.
The South of the 19th Century put no such demands on poor white women who worked hard in the home as well as in the fields, as needed, and who in many ways experienced more freedom than the sheltered Southern belle. Poor women went to town to sell what they produced on their farms and in their workrooms. They also had the capability of earning an income to supplement their husband's wages.
The women of the plantations stayed at home for months at a time, having everything they needed brought to them. Visits to relatives or friends or a rare trip North or to Europe gave Southern women an infrequent respite from extended times at home. The city belles had more social opportunities, but still lived under a restrictive set of rules outlining what was and was not acceptable behavior. The only permissible area of responsibility for mistresses of the mansions lay in managing their homes. Society expected women to remain in the private sphere of family and hearth, but many women stepped down off their pedestals when the war started and discovered their competency at performing their husbands tasks, {and} there seemed to be no limits to what chore they would turn to next to ensure the upkeep of the lands and the survival of their families. Indeed, these sheltered women now came face-to-face with the realities previously hidden from them.
No one asked these women what they thought of sending fathers, husbands, and sons to war. Once again, men had chosen the circumstances and women gave their all in support of a war fought, in part, to preserve a life style, when in fact, their lives would be forever changed.
Plantation mistresses fought their own battle, for as their wealth decreased, they had to overcome the tremendous psychological impact of stepping across not only gender but class boundaries.
Employment
At this time in history, women had very few options open to them; they could be employed as seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, or milliners. With the war came a shortage of manpower and suddenly it was acceptable for women to step in and do men's work. As more men answered the call, the conscription of male teachers provided women an opportunity to step into the profession. Women were kept firmly in their place until it was absolutely necessary to allow them a few of the freedoms that men have historically killed each other for in order to retain those freedoms for themselves.
A popular song of the era urged, Just take your gun and go, for Ruth can drive the oxen, John, and I can use the hoe, and indeed they did. The invention of horse-drawn farm equipment made it easier for women and children in the North to work family farms with little or no help from men. In the South, most slaves still worked the fields without benefit of horse-drawn equipment. When the slaves left, their owner's wife and children worked the fields and did the chores with hand tools.
For women, the war meant more opportunities as well as more problems. As the death tolls rose and more soldiers became permanently disabled, many women found themselves left to carry the burden of providing for their families. In her diary, Judith McGuire wrote about a Confederate widow who lived in one room with her three children and tried to keep them fed on a small patch of turnip greens. As the war progressed and the blockades tightened, the
Southern charities had less and less to give.
Nursing
Gerda Lerner, a Robinson-Edwards Professor of History Emerita at the University of Wisconsin, writes that prior to the Civil War, there was no organized care of injured soldiers. Slightly wounded men or those otherwise unfit for duty nursed the seriously wounded.
While the army was saying 'no' to the many offers of help from women, the wounded lay dying in filthy and sometimes wet clothing and bedding, unfed, unwashed, and unattended. As casualties mounted and women persisted in offering their help, the army relented. In her diary, Jan Swisshelm tells of male nurses who would not work, surgeons who would not share their blankets, and of the wounded lying without any care, their wounds full of worms.
Mike Wright, an Emmy award winning writer, agrees that any time women became involved with the patients, the mortality rate dropped dramatically. Sally Thompkins opened a small hospital at her own expense ten days after the Battle of Manassas. Through her excellent care, her patients had an astounding survival rate, (more than ninety percent). She was one of the few women recognized for her work and received a military commission with the rank and pay of an army captain. She donated her pay to the Confederate Army.
Unlike most Northern women, women in the South had the war fought on their doorsteps. Women once considered too delicate to witness the coarser side of life suddenly found themselves opening their homes to dozens of bloody and mangled men.
Charity
Charitable endeavors were considered an acceptable pastime for proper women. Jane Stuart Woolsey tells of lint-making and the tearing of endless lengths of flannel and cotton bandages and cutting of innumerable garments.
In addition to daily household chores, providing income for their families, and sewing and knitting for the troops, these women also held fund raisers, collecting money to provide their troops with basic necessities. Donald Jackson describes a talent show that charged an admission of one potato or five onions. These admission fees and a few extra rows in the family gardens produced over one thousand barrels of food a week.
Louisa Mae Alcott wrote in her diary in October, 1861, sewing and knitting for 'our boys' all the time. It seems as if a few energetic women could carry on the war better than the men do it so far.
Shortages
The extensive industrialization of the North served its people and army well. Although the price of some items increased, the North saw none of the wide spread shortages seen in the South. As early as 1862, supplies had become a critical issue within the blockaded South.
The average woman remade her family's wardrobes, turning collars and cuffs and cutting down adult clothing to fit her children. As the war progressed and dry goods became scarce and very expensive, remaking clothing was yet another skill to be learned by the upper-class women of the South. With their supply of reusable clothing exhausted, women revived home production processes not seen since colonial days. Many women learned to spin and weave cloth to make clothing for their slaves, their soldiers, and often for themselves. Even though these well-off women had worn silks and brocades for most of their lives, they must have felt proud of their ability to provide the much needed clothing.
The health and well-being of her family and slaves were traditionally the responsibility of the lady of the manor. As conventional medicines became scarce, Confederate housewives turned to their slaves to learn herbal remedies handed down generation to generation. Doctors were, of course, with the troops leaving no one for these women to rely on but the knowledgeable slaves who served them.
As more slaves escaped to the Union lines creating a shortage of workers, women had to plant crops, cut wood, and produce nearly everything they needed, and participate in chores they had not previously even supervised. Elizabeth Fuller wrote to her husband in 1862, I have just got able to walk across the house I hurt my back trying to fix the turnip patch fence to keep out the hogs.
Not only did the south have severe shortages of every necessity, they also had problems transporting what they did have. Privately owned horses, mules, and wagons were taken to the battlefields. Bridges and railroad tracks were destroyed by both the Union and the
Confederate Armies. While the North had an overabundance of some supplies, an officer in Lee's army wrote home complaining, It's hard to maintain one's patriotism on ash cake and water. The women at home worked all the harder to feed their army.
As the was progressed, inflation eroded the income of even the wealthy. Northern shoppers saw prices increase to eighty percent, while the people of the South struggled to survive with inflation reaching over 9,000 percent.
As the people of the South slowly starved, the Confederate government kept supplies in reserve for its troops. Wright tells of women and children, still wearing silk but looking skeletal. Proud women who would never beg were filled with indignation and took to the streets to riot for bread. After the women started the riot, the men joined in, and that afternoon the government opened the warehouses and distributed rice to the cities hungry people.
Looting and Damage
Women from the border states and some areas of Pennsylvania lived with fighting close at hand. As the war progressed and the Union Army left those areas and forged deeply into the South, the women there had to keep moving with their children to avoid the battles. War is a great equalizer, soon rich and poor alike were homeless.
Trenches were dug and reinforced with logs and any trees left standing were soon shot to pieces. As the Confederate Army retreated, they burned anything they thought the Union Army might find of use. As the Union Army advanced, canon shells destroyed buildings and started more fires.
When Sherman marched on Atlanta, his army traveled light and lived off the land as they moved. Sixty-two thousand Union soldiers fell on Georgia like a plague of locusts. Corn cribs, smokehouse, and barns were emptied and set on fire. Houses were looted and much was destroyed. As Sherman's bummers advanced, women buried family treasures in their yards hoping to have something of their former lives left after the war.
As the Union troops marched deeper into the South, the women fought back as they could. In New Orleans, a woman dumped the contents of a chamber pot on Captain Farragut's head. Another woman used a riding crop to keep a Federal officer from entering her house, causing an observer to write, The women were by all odds far worse rebels than the men.
Even with all the loss and destruction, it was the deaths of 260,000 Confederate men and boys, nearly one-fourth of the men in the South, that had the greatest impact on the women who survived them. A favorite saying during the war was, that every bullet killed or wounded twice, once on the battlefront and once on the home front.
Of the returning veterans, many found it difficult to live with women who refused to go back to how things had been before the war. Southern women had successfully crossed the lines delineated by gender. Brown writes that Men sued for divorce at a rate three times greater than they had prior to the Civil War,: once again leaving women to provide for themselves and their children as courts began granting women custody. Women, no longer financially dependent on abusive or unfaithful husbands, often initiated divorce themselves.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, women went back to their hearths. After the Civil War, many Southern women did not step back into their former restrictive way of life. For some it was no longer an option, for others it was a choice. At the least, the Civil War was a milestone in women's fight for liberty, for them and for the nation.
The women of the South reinvented themselves, and rather than concealing the changes in their lives, those changes became a legacy for their daughters and granddaughters and a road map to the future.
Sources
Scraping Lint, Roger Adams
American Civil War Women, Ida Baker
The Women Left Behind: Transformation of the Southern Belle, 1840-1880, Alexis Girardin Brown
The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, Bruce Catton
Confederate Ordeal: The Southern Home Front, Steven A. Channing
Tara Revisited: Women, War and the Plantation Legend, Catherine Clinton
The Civil War: Strange and Fascinating Facts, Burke Davis
The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and Memory of the War, 1861-1900, Alice Fahs
Finding Home, Robert Gilman
Patriots in Disguise, Richard Hall
Twenty Million Yankees: The Northern Home Front, Donald Dale Jackson
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Housework in Late 19th Century America, Steven Mintz and John and Rebecca Moores
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Untitled, Irene Sturber
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