Southern Women in the Civil War: Gender, Slavery, and Identity

Introduction: Southern Women and the Pressures of War

This essay examines Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust, focusing specifically on how the instabilities of the Civil War South forced white southern women to alter their behavior. What was the key issue they faced as white men were compelled to go to the front? In what way did altered gender roles lead to altered clothing styles? And what does clothing tell us about civil society? Southern women faced many difficulties during the Civil War. They had to take on new roles that did not fit their upbringing, and they had to make significant changes to the way they lived and worked. It was a difficult and demanding time, and some of them discovered themselves, while others discovered they were closer to their enslaved workers than they ever would have believed.

Managing Slaves: Fear, Violence, and Unfamiliar Authority

The South, being at a distinct disadvantage for most of the Civil War, sent as many able-bodied men as possible to the fighting front. Women had to step in and run the farms and plantations in their men's absence, and this included managing an increasingly volatile slave population. As Faust notes, "Women called to manage increasingly restive and even rebellious slaves were in a significant sense garrisoning a second front in the South's war against Yankee domination" (Faust 54). This was a new and different role for most of these women, and many of the men who remained in the South did not appreciate or value it. In fact, many of them resisted female management; as Faust observes, "These issues went beyond questions of gender; they represented deep-seated worries about sex" (Faust 55).

The key issue facing most women thrust into these unfamiliar roles was fear. They felt incapable of managing a large group of enslaved people, and some feared for their physical safety. Many women felt they could not trust their slaves or manage them as effectively as their husbands or overseers could. Some slave actions seemed to bear this out: the author recounts cases of women smothered in their beds and other violent episodes (Faust 57–58). Women were afraid of their slaves, and it appears that many enslaved people could sense this fear and took advantage of it.

In their male-centered society, men had typically dominated the enslaved population through fear of violence and punishment. Faust explains, "In the prewar years, exercise of the violence fundamental to slavery was overwhelmingly the responsibility and prerogative of white men. A white woman disciplined and punished as the master's subordinate and surrogate" (Faust 63). Southern women had been raised to be dependent on men for their support. When the men marched off to war, women had to take on roles for which their upbringing had left them deeply unprepared. One woman wrote despairingly: "I am so sick of trying to do a man's business when I am nothing but a poor contemptible piece of multiplying human flesh tied to the house by a crying young one, looked upon as belonging to a race of inferior beings" (Faust 65).

Interestingly, this woman described herself in terms almost identical to those most southerners applied to their slaves — a telling parallel suggesting that she and the people she enslaved had more in common than she had ever imagined. Raised to be dependent, southern women were not prepared to run a farm; they were expected to be "inferior beings" subordinate to their husbands, and thus they occupied a social niche almost as dependent as the one imposed upon enslaved people. As more and more Black men and women left plantations for freedom, white women found themselves without domestic servants and with no practical knowledge of how to cook, clean, or do their own laundry. Raised as ladies, they were suddenly forced into menial labor, and for some it was almost unbearable. Managing enslaved people had been difficult; living without them proved equally so.

Unlikely Alliances and the Limits of Female Power

Not all white southern women feared their slaves. Some came to see them as protectors and allies against the hated Yankees. Faust writes, "There were in fact slaves who buried the master's silver to hide it from the enemy; there were slaves, like one Catherine Edmondston described, who drew knives to defend mistresses against Yankee troops" (Faust 61). These women had to rely on enslaved people for many things, including their very survival, and for many it was an uneasy alliance shaped by mutual need rather than mutual trust.

One of the greatest challenges women faced in asserting authority over enslaved workers was the use of physical coercion. Slavery in the American South had always depended on the threat and application of violence, a prerogative that had been culturally coded as masculine. When women were compelled to assume that role, they did so without the cultural authority or personal preparation their husbands had possessed. The result was a profound instability: women who could not credibly threaten violence found their authority undermined, while those who attempted to use force often discovered it cost them as much psychologically as it resolved practically. The Civil War thus exposed how completely the plantation system had rested on a gendered hierarchy of power that women alone could not sustain.

Conclusion: The Transformed South

The Civil War impacted southern women in a number of profound ways. Some discovered they were strong enough to run a farm while the men were away at war; others found they were not. They confronted their fears, their difficulties, and their hopes, and kept the South functioning while men fought at the front. The war also forced far-reaching changes to society, including changes in clothing and hairstyles that registered something deeper: a shift in how women understood themselves and their place in the world. Southern women were different after the war — just as the entire South was different.

References

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.