The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895

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Description

This impressively researched book tells the necessary but little-known story of elite southern white women’s successful quest for a measure of self-reliance and independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow. Profusely illustrated with the experiences of fascinating women in Virginia and North Carolina, it presents a compelling new chapter in the history of American women and of the South.

As were many ideas, notions of the ideal woman were in flux after the Civil War. Whilst poverty added a harder edge to the seek for a good marriage among some “southern belles,” other privileged white women forged identities that challenged the belle model altogether. Their private and public writings from the 1870s and 1880s suggest a widespread ethic of autonomy. On occasion that meant increased domestic skills born of the new reality of fewer servants. But women also owned and transmitted property, worked for pay, and even pursued long-term careers. Many found a voice in a plethora of new voluntary organizations, and a few southern women attained national celebrity in the literary world, creating strong and capable heroines and mirroring an evolving view toward northern society.

Yet while elite southern women experimented with their roles, external forces and contradictions within their position were making their unprecedented attitudes and achievements socially untenable. All over the 1890s, alternatively, virulent racism and pressures to re-create a mythic South left these women caught between the revived image of the southern belle and the emerging emancipated woman. Just as the memoirs of southern white women have been key to understanding life All over the Civil War, the writings of such women unlock the years of dramatic change that followed. Informed by myriad number one documents, Jane Turner Censer immerses us on this planet of postwar southern women as they rethought and rebuilt themselves, their families, and their region All over a brief but necessary period of relative freedom.

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