Gender matters : Civil War, Reconstruction, and the making of the new South

What role did gender play in the secession crisis? In the loyalty of the civilian population during the Civil War? In the formation of the Ku Klux Klan? In class organization and conflict in the postwar textile industry? Why was the first woman senator from the U.S. South? What role did sexuality and gender play in the explosion of racial violence in the late nineteenth century? These questions and many others concerning the critical role that gender played in the major events of the nineteenth-century South and the nation more generally are addressed in this collection of essays.

In her powerful and persuasive series of essays, Gender Matters, covering everything from women's roles in the Civil War South to the first woman (Georgian Rebecca Latimer Felton) to serve in the United States Senate to feminist challenges to white supremacists in the late 20th century, LeeAnn Whites convinces us not only that gender does matter, but that the struggle to understand the influence of status and sexuality on American history should move to center stage. Whites demonstrates with her elegant and impressive historical case studies that by moving gender to the forefront, we can better appreciate historical agency, placing sex within a powerful nexus of interlocking issues such as class, region and race. Whites not only proves her proposition that gender matters, but offers trenchant, insightful criticism about why gender, and why struggles, must continue.—Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman, The Road to Freedom

Taking us far beyond a 'brothers' war,' LeeAnn Whites demonstrates the centrality of gendered behavior and discourse to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Whether discussing men's wartime rhetoric, women's contributions to the Myth of the Lost Cause, or racial terrorization in the post-bellum South, her analysis of gender and class as underlying factors in the creation of a racially-segregated New South is unparalleled. This collection of essays will stimulate lively debates among students of the Civil War and nineteenth-century South.—Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War

In this superb collection of essays LeeAnn Whites illustrates just how much gender really does matter. Whites has a particular gift for the clever, evocative essay that forces the reader to examine evidence from new angles. Here she has strung together a series of small jewels, demonstrating how both the familiar and the unexplored are better understood when we pay attention to how gender shaped the story, and how the story shaped gender. Throughout the volume Whites guides the reader to new perspectives on the Civil War and the postwar south, showing how gender was not merely apart from, or subservient to, the familiar forces of race, lclass, and region, but was inextricably woven into the fabric of society. This book is both an important contribution to the scholarship on nineteenth-century America, and a valuable statement about the historian’s craft.—J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida, and author of Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War and Anna Elizabeth Dickinson: A Life in Public

Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-8 Front Matter....Pages 9-9 The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender....Pages 11-24 Strong Minds and Strong Hearts: The Ladies National League and the Civil War as an Intragender War....Pages 25-44 “A Rebel Though She Be”: Gender and Missouri’s War of the Households....Pages 45-64 Home Guards and Home Traitors: Loyalty and Prostitution in Civil War St. Louis....Pages 65-83 “Stand By Your Man”: The Ladies Memorial Association and the Reconstruction of Southern White Manhood....Pages 85-94 “You Can’t Change History By Moving a Rock”: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Politics of Confederate Memorialization....Pages 95-111 Front Matter....Pages 113-113 Paternalism and Protest in Augusta’s Cotton Mills: What’s Gender Got to do with It?....Pages 115-125 The De Graffenried Controversy: Class, Race, and Gender in the New South....Pages 127-149 Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Problem of Protection in the New South....Pages 151-165 Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife’s Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform....Pages 167-176 Love, Hate, Rape, Lynching: Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Gender Politics of Racial Violence....Pages 177-192 Back Matter....Pages 193-244 What role did gender play in the secession crisis between the North and South in Civil War America? How did gender affect the loyalties of the civilian population during that war? In what ways did it influence the formation of the Ku Klux Klan? And why was the first woman United States senator from the South?Renowned historian LeeAnn Whites answers these important questions and more in this necessary collection of essays on the intersection of gender and Southern history. Arguing that gender matters not only in the personal histories of individuals, but also along racial and class lines in the South, Whites offers a broad chronological scope and range of events in Southern history, all of which would have had a different outcome if not for the varied influence of gender. Gender Matters is at once a collection for gender studies, Southern history, and greater United States history. 'Gender Matters' offers a new reading of the history of the South through the 19th century from the perspective of gender, exploring the role of gender in the secession and the civil war, in the racial tensions that persisted after the war & in the classtensions in the postwar textile industry