Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 10

after the south suffered a series of devastating defeats. This paper, however, shall propose
that such a timeline is only true of elite white women. Their poorer counterparts lost any
sense of nationalism more than a year earlier, in the Spring of 1862.
It has been said that southern women were some of the greatest recruiters for the
Confederate army, the romance of combat lent itself to concepts of southern honour, and
subsequently many women actively encouraged their menfolk to be the first volunteer 1 . In
fact, there were even reports of women in Texas sending hoop skirts to men who did not
immediately enlist. However as the weeks turned into months and it became apparent that
the war would last far longer than anyone had initially anticipated, a clear conflict between
the patriotic feelings of elite southern women and their concern for their loved ones and their
own welfare began to make itself apparent. 2 The very existence of the 1862 Conscription Act
demonstrates that even the elites whose very way of life depended on the war's outcome
were becoming less willing to send their menfolk into battle. 3 Unlike poor white women this
lack of enthusiasm was not due on the whole to a rapidly declining level of patriotic feeling,
but discomfort with the new roles that the war had forced upon them. When the elite men
of society departed for battle, their female counterparts were now forced to fill the positions
of the domestic authority figure, responsible for managing slaves and large plantations. These
women had transitioned from a life of dependency to one involving a frightening level of
independence, and while some women rose to meet the challenges of running plantations
with grace, many more believed themselves to be unfit slave masters. Slaves were becoming
increasingly rebellious, riled up by the potential for emancipation and taking advantage of
1
Mary Elizabeth Massey., Women in the Civil War, USA, Bison Books, 1994, p.30
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding south in the American Civil War, Chapel
Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p.13
3
David Williams,et al., Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia, Gainsville,
University Press of Florida, 2002, p.91
2
3