Women of the Slaveholding South During the Civil War

Introduction and Overview

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), written by Drew Gilpin Faust, is a book about women in the South during the Civil War. The broader issue the book addresses is how women can empower themselves even in the face of hardship and — although the word is strong — the oppressions that society places upon them.

The preface to Faust's book contains a revealing quote that she attributes to her mother: "I am sure that the origins of this book lie somewhere in that youthful experience, and in the continued confrontations with my mother, until the very eve of her death, when I was 19, about the requirements of what she usually called femininity. It's a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be."

Faust chooses to write the book from the perspective of slave-owning women. The title Mothers of Invention refers to the Confederate white women of slaveholding families. The book tells the story of their experiences during the Civil War — how they endured, adapted, and what they learned along the way.

Faust's Central Argument and Historical Significance

Faust's main purpose in writing the book is to bring to light a part of women's history that, until roughly a decade before its publication, had been largely discounted. In that sense, Faust is a trailblazer: her book is among the first to argue that examining the trials and tribulations of Southern women during the Civil War is an important means of recovering another dimension of women's Civil War history.

As years passed with no end to the war in sight, emotional and material deprivation took an inescapable psychological toll. Faust writes: "A rising sense of personal desperation… prompted women to reconsider the most fundamental assumptions about their world… they had begun inevitably to think about themselves" (234). This shift in self-awareness is central to Faust's argument about how the war transformed Southern womanhood.

Women Left Behind: Managing Plantations and Daily Life

According to Faust, three out of every four white men were sent to war, and enslaved Black men were left to work on the plantations. When the war began and women found themselves on their own, they first had to decide whether to remain at their plantations or move in with family. The management of the household and their lives became more pressing than ever — providing food for themselves and the enslaved people they held, maintaining economic stability, and handling matters they had never before been expected to manage alone.

Through the story of Lizzie Neblett, readers see one woman's frustration with these tasks vividly. She wrote about her eleven enslaved people and the difficulties of managing them, her anger at her absent husband, her dread of another pregnancy, her need to ask a neighbor for help in controlling the enslaved workers, and how her identity as a "lady" was thoroughly upended when her husband left for the war.

In one section of the book, Faust includes a photograph of a woman named Sarah Hughes, whose plantation was overtaken when the people she had enslaved fled to freedom. Though once wealthy, she was left with nothing at all — a stark illustration of how completely the war dismantled the world these women had known.

Conclusion and Recommendation

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in women's history or the Civil War. It demonstrates how women can cope with adversity and offers a new perspective on a conflict that is often told through the experiences of men on the battlefield. Faust's work is a valuable and long-overdue contribution to our understanding of how war reshapes the lives of those left behind.