The Civilian War : Confederate Women and Union Soldiers During Sherman's March
Lisa Tendrich Frank (Author)
The Civilian War explores home front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman's March, a campaign that put women at the center of a Union army operation for the first time. Ordered to crush the morale as well as the military infrastructure of the Confederacy, Sherman and his army increasingly targeted wealthy civilians in their progress through Georgia and the Carolinas. To drive home the full extent of northern domination over the South, Sherman's soldiers besieged the female domain - going into bedrooms and parlors, seizing correspondence and personal treasures - with the aim of insulting and humiliating upper-class southern women. These efforts blurred the distinction between home front and warfront, creating confrontations in the domestic sphere as a part of the war itself. Historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that ideas about women and their roles in war shaped the expectations of both Union soldiers and Confederate civilians. Sherman recognized that slaveholding Confederate women accepted the plunder of food and munitions as an inevitable part of the conflict, but they considered Union invasion of their private spaces an unforgivable and unreasonable transgression. These intrusions strengthened the resolve of many southern women to continue the fight against the Union and its most despised general. Seamlessly merging gender studies and military history, The Civilian War illuminates the distinction between the damage inflicted on the battlefield and the offenses that occured in the domestic realm during the Civil War. Ultimately, Frank's research demonstrates why many women in the Lower South remained steadfastly committed to the Confederate cause even when their prospects seemed most dim. -- from dust jacket
Print Book, English, 2015
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2015
History
xi, 237 pages ; 24 cm.
9780807159965, 0807159964
894313641
Introduction: Sherman's march and southern women
Becoming Confederates
Punishing southern women
Working for war
Confronting the enemy
Asserting Confederate womanhood
Epilogue: shaming southern soldiers