Table Of ContentGender Matters
Gender Matters
Civil War, Reconstruction,
and the Making of the
New South
By LeeAnn Whites
palgrave
macmillan
GENDERMATTERS
© LeeAnn Whites,2005.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-6311-6
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2005 by
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ISBN 978-1-4039-6312-3 ISBN 978-1-137-05915-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-05915-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whites,LeeAnn
Gender matters :Civil War,Reconstruction,and the making of the new
South / LeeAnn Whites.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Southern States—History—19th century.2.Southern States—Social
conditions—19th century.3.Sex role—Southern States—History—19th
century.4.Women—Southern States—History—19th century.
5.United States—History—Civil War,1861–1865—Women.6.United States—
History—Civil War,1861–1865—Social aspects.7.Reconstruction (U.S.history,
1865–1877).8.Felton,Rebecca Latimer,1835–1930.9.Georgia—Politics and
government—1865–1950.10.Georgia—Social conditions—19th century.
I.Title.
F215.W545 2005
975(cid:2).03—dc22 2004043152
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India.
First edition:May 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sarah
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I Civil War and Reconstruction:
Turning the Household Inside Out 9
1. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender 11
2. Strong Minds and Strong Hearts: The Ladies
National League and the Civil War as an
Intragender War 25
3. “ARebel Though She Be”: Gender and Missouri’s
War of the Households 45
4. Home Guards and Home Traitors: Loyalty
and Prostitution in Civil War St. Louis 65
5. “Stand By Your Man”: The Ladies Memorial
Association and the Reconstruction of Southern
White Manhood 85
6. “You Can’t Change History By Moving a
Rock”: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Politics
of Confederate Memorialization 95
Part II Gender, Race, and Class in
the Making of the New South 113
7. Paternalism and Protest in Augusta’s
Cotton Mills: What’s Gender Got to do with It? 115
8. The De Graffenried Controversy: Class, Race,
and Gender in the New South 127
viii Contents
9. Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Problem of
Protection in the New South 151
10. Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife’s Farm: The
Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform 167
11. Love, Hate, Rape, Lynching: Rebecca Latimer
Felton and the Gender Politics of Racial Violence 177
Notes 193
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
Introduction
T he central proposition of this historical work is that gender
matters. Gender matters in the lives of individuals. We experi-
ence our lives filtered through the lens of gender norms and
gender roles. We understand ourselves as gendered beings. Gender matters
in our relations to others—whether in our personal or public lives, as
mothers, fathers, workers, or employers—and structures our place in rela-
tion to others. It provides one lens through which we experience, inter-
pret, appreciate, and judge the nature, the character, and the meaning of
our relations to others. While gender matters most obviously in relations
between men and women, and many would in fact argue that relations
between men and women create gender itself, it is a proposition of this
study that gender matters as much across the racial and class lines of the
social order as it does between men and women of the same race and class.
Altogether, gender matters in the myriad ways that it constructs indi-
vidual’s sense of themselves and their place in the social order; in the way
that it serves as one frame of social relations across the social landscape,
from the most personal and intimate relations of the family to the most
public and anonymous relations of the workplace or urban life. Gender
matters in the way that society develops, is experienced, is transformed by
individuals and groups acting out of their gendered identity, and social
relations based on that identity.1
The location in time and place of this historical work is the nineteenth
century. The nineteenth century was, for the country as a whole, a period
of astonishing social transformation along virtually every axis of prior
social ordering, as the rural became urban, the subsistence economy became
market based, and the relatively independent male-headed household
became the dependent and yet “separate” sphere of the family. In the
South, this transformation of a traditional to a modern social order was
experienced in a particularly extreme and wrenching fashion. Many would
argue that it was so wrenching and so extreme that the South never made
it to “modern” in the nineteenth century. There was, in the first place, the
extremity of slavery, extreme in its existence and extreme in its abolition.
There was the wrenching fashion in which slavery as a social form, and the
South as the politically and economically dominant region, was taken
down in the violence of war, both the formal war of 1861–1865, and the
long and grinding economic and social war in the decades that followed.
These three factors: slavery, war, and the poverty and violence of the
