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A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852–1864

Amazon.com Price:  $43.12 (as of 23/04/2019 15:35 PST- Details)

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Description

A Rebel Wife in Texas offers a singular glimpse into nineteenth-century southern culture through the eyes of a captivating and complex woman who, as a product of that culture, both revered and reviled it.

Elizabeth Scott Neblett used to be raised in a slaveholding circle of relatives in eastern Texas. Despite the frontier conditions, she used to be very much a southern belle who embraced conventional dictates and aspired to the “cult of true womanhood.” Neblett entered romantic marriage and motherhood with optimism, but over the years her experiences as a wife and mother made her severe and more and more despondent. When the Civil War ripped away the existing social structure and took her husband away from home, she used to be pressed to assume many of his responsibilities, including managing the circle of relatives property and its eleven slaves. Frustrated by a growing sense of powerlessness and inadequacy, she regularly railed in anger against herself, her husband, and her children.

Skillfully edited and annotated, A Rebel Wife in Texas is a rich resource for anyone researching the nineteenth-century South, not least for its observations on slave and class relations, regional politics, lynching, farm management, medical practices, mental illness, and the Civil War in Texas. It also offers an uncommonly intimate perspective on marriage all over that era. The frankness, desperation, and detail with which Neblett discusses birth regulate and child rearing make this a unique collection of letters.

Elizabeth Scott Neblett’s autobiographical record is the fascinating tale of one woman’s life―a life both peculiar and strange. It’s also, in important ways, the wider story of a culture rent by turmoil from within and without.

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