Faust Women Before The Civil War Summary

Drew Giplin Faust grew up in Virginia during the 1950’s. During these times it was considered disrespectful to call adult white females, “women”, but instead they preferred to be addressed as “ladies”. Drew Faust found this idea to be vexatious and since Faust’s mother (Catherine Mellick) was a firm advocate of this idea, this built a lot of tension and strife between the two. Drew responded by not only refusing to wear dresses but also dismissed the idea of joining women’s social clubs, and all other things that were known to be accustomed to females. Instead Faust decided to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. Faust’s purpose for writing Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War stemmed from her experiences
of her youth and rocky relationship with her mother due to her customs of how females should possess certain qualities of femininity.
In Faust’s book she offers interpretations of the lives’ of white elite southern women during the Civil War. The war brought many issues such as race relations and the traditional idea that men were superior and combined with slavery made women take look at their place in society. As a result of their wartime experience, women "sought to invent new foundations for self-definition and self-worth" (p. 7). At the end of the war women were determined never to be helpless again, but they also recognized the need of a patriarchy system to help them maintain their privileged status as elite southern women.
Faust provides an in depth analysis of how the war changed but helped sustain traditional patriarchal attitudes among elite southern white women.
The evidence used to give insight into this period of time comes from newspapers, books, government documents, the diaries, letters, and memoirs of five hundred southern women. In Faust’s writings she shows the changing sense of self identity that Confederate women experienced as they dealt with a war fought on their own yards. The issues that came up due to war forced southern women to become "mothers of invention". At the end of the war women left from being behind the senses at home but taking on a more public role in
society.
The feeling of uselessness caused women to create organizations and help promote the patriotic cause. Whether it was knitting socks, rolling bandages, petitioning the government, raising funds for the cause, these organizations brought many women into public life for the first time. While women were able to change their lives, households and go without certain goods, the biggest change in their lives came when they had to take over the management of slaves. The idea of women as submissive, passive, and subordinate was challenge when this happened. The problem of taking control of their slaves grew as the war continued and ultimately "did much to undermine women's active support for both slavery and the Confederate cause" (p. 56).
Frustrated from failed attempts at controlling slaves many women, “began to persuade themselves that the institution had become a greater inconvenience than benefit" (p.
73). Faust writes of the continued issues faced by southern women, "Confederate women fled from the responsibility of empowerment into the reassuring safety of tradition's protective shelter" (p. 211) and this is shown with the description of Benjamin Butler's General Order No. 28 in New Orleans. To stop women's insulting behavior toward Union soldiers and maintain order in the city, Butler proclaimed his intention to treat all offending women as he would prostitutes. Butler recognized the public power of women, and controlled them by threatening their identities as ladies, that was all it took for women to stop the
insults.
After the war southern elite white women struggled to adjust to their new way of life .This new life forced them into new jobs such as teaches nurses and even solders. Along with the new jobs they picked up new habits such as reading and writing and their attitudes towards religion and marriage change as well. They invented a new sense of self identity based on "individual right and identity, of self-interest, that was strikingly modern" (p. 242). In the end, southern women once again embraced patriarchy. Southern elite white women’s reason for accepting it had change and was completely different.
As Lucy Buck explained, "We shall never any of us be the same as we have been" (p. 3). The Civil War changed women's confidence in men, religion, state, and society, they looked at the positives of patriarchy against its negatives and chose "the cherished prerogatives of race and class, of whiteness and elitism" (p. 233). Faust’s Mothers of Invention is an important book that will be the foundation for future interpretations of the meaning of the Civil War to southern women. Faust has added complexity and ambiguity to our vision of southern women, and historians will hereafter have to contend with many of the issues she has raised. Some will assert that women had always known the value of patriarchy. They will ask whether the war, after all, was simply a chance women seized.
Mothers of Invention will require further investigations into whether the war made significant, long-lasting changes for women. Essential reading for Civil War historians, it is an evocative and persuasively argued reinterpretation of the inner lives of elite southern women.