Scarlett Doesn\'t Live Here Anymore:

SCARLETT DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE:

SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA

In this superbly researched and entertaining work of non-fiction, Laura F. Edwards, associate professor of history at Duke University and author of several other books on the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, explores the history of the Deep South before, during and after the War Between the States with a focus on the roles of women in Southern society and how they came together as mothers, sisters and caregivers to provide for their loved ones, both at home and after returning from the battlefield. These women of the Deep South in states like North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, were not just white women of a high social standing but also freed black women and slaves who were forced to confront the violence of war and the destruction of their families and the Southern way of life.

The title of Edwards' book is of course a reference to Scarlett O'Hara, the female protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind which chronicles the life of Scarlett as a Southern belle before the outbreak of the Civil War and her gallant efforts to survive in a world torn apart by the struggle over state's rights and the issue of slavery between the Union and the Confederacy. After the war, Scarlett finds herself living in a world completely unrecognizable, for the Old South has disappeared, thus making Scarlett a stranger in her own homeland. In essence, the old world of the South is "Gone With The Wind" and will never return.

Unlike a number of other books related to women and the Civil War, Scarlett Doesn't

Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Champaign: University of Illinois

Press, 2004) emphasizes the importance of the domesticated household to the society of the Deep

South and how women of the Southern gentry slowly made headway in a gentleman's world related to their political views on an entire range of subjects, most notably women's suffrage and equal rights long before the rise of such historical figures as Susan B. 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.