Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War - Paperback

by Drew Gilpin Faust (Author)

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain.

Front Jacket

Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

Author Biography

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University. Her books include Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South, and This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.