3 - Southern Women and the Civil War

Summary

“Nobody expected to have to contend with the women.” Here, Stephanie McCurry referred to the inability of Confederate powerbrokers to anticipate that their project of building a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state hinged on the support and dedication of millions of Southerners whom they had refused to recognize as political beings. The campaign to secure the loyalty of nonslaveholding men, McCurry explained, “was expected and it exacted its price.” Yet “There would be far more of the people to contend with in the making of the history of the Civil War South than the founders ever bargained on.” Her prize-winning 2010 history of the Confederacy’s rise and fall, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, highlights the profound irony of the Confederate experiment: in the attempt to erect a proslavery nation, its architects “provoked precisely the transformation of their own political culture they had hoped to avoid, bringing into the making of history those people – the South’s massive unfranchised population of white women … – whose political dispossession they intended to render permanent.”