Anthony, Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As to her documentation on such a wide and diverse subject as women during the mid 19th century, Edwards utilizes both primary and secondary sources, such as letters written at the time of the war, personal diaries kept by homebound wives, sisters and sweethearts, newspaper accounts from sources like the New York Herald, government and legal records, and a select group of secondary sources covering more than a hundred years worth of extrapolations on the Civil War and how and why American society altered so drastically after the war during the period known as Reconstruction.

Edwards also relates the personal stories of a number of Southern women who witnessed the devastation of the war firsthand. For example, there is Harriet Jacobs, a plantation slave who escapes from her Master and hides in his attic for seven years until the end of the...

In addition, Edwards documents the lives of several white Southern belles like the fictional Scarlett O'Hara who entered into business for themselves after the war and prospered despite the economic trouble related to Reconstruction.
Overall, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era

reminds the reader that even though Southern women of the Civil War period were still viewed as property by their husbands and had no political rights, they managed to overcome these and other huge barriers by expressing their own inner feelings and desires and by establishing a place for themselves in a world fraught with discrimination, prejudice and bitter hatred.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edwards, Laura F. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War

Era. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004.