Mothers Of Invention Women Of The American Civil War

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War is a work by Drew Gilpin Faust, a renowned American historian and current President of Harvard University. Published in 1996 by the University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill, this is one of the several literary works by Faust describing history of the Civil War and of the American South. This nonfiction book includes 257 pages detailing the struggles and labors of the women on the Southern home front during the American Civil War, as well as 67 pages of notes, a bibliographic note, and an index. The book illustrates the hardships of wives and their children during the war and describes many changes they endured throughout the nineteenth century. In†¦show more content†¦As their social class and society disintegrated around them, some women struggled to manage slave-worked planting fields or command female households, while others performed paid jobs in schools as teachers, in hospitals as nurses, and government occupations across the Confederacy. Lizzie Neblett, a Texan housewife, for example, gained more pivotal duties in a short span of time than she ever had in her entire life, she found strenuous labor especially cumbersome physically and mentally. Another hardship of the war was the strain it placed on married life. Men and women alike faced troubles with their significant others during wartimes because of the lack of intimacy, heavy turmoil, and a burdening depression overlaying the nation. Consequently, however, the expression of emotions previously overlooked before the outbreak of conflict between spouses was encouraged through martial separations caused by the war. Husbands and wives faced loneliness on a daily basis, which in effect led them to display compassion and caring towards each other as they witnessed the dreadfulness of war. This separation also caused a growth in feminine education and style, further forging the foundations for a new, individual American woman. Gathering from diaries, newspapers, letters, memoirs, and biographies, Faust depicts specific effects of the American Civil War on southern women, the antebellum social hierarchy of the Confederacy, and the overall upheaval of livesShow MoreRelatedWomen Of The American Civil War1369 Words   |  6 Pages Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War provides a look into the rarely discussed topic of women in the South during the time of the Civil War. 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