Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Seite 9

confederate loss rarely being drawn. This is despite the fact that the home front was
overwhelming female with approximately 90% of eligible men away at war. This paper seeks
to explore the ways in which southern women were detrimental to the war effort, and in
order to present a more comprehensive analysis, it will cross the boundaries of class and
explore women from all economic groups. The argument presented will be three-fold; firstly,
it shall examine the way in which elite white women’s frequent requests for the exemptions
removed men from the battlefields, increased the workload of Confederate officials, and most
importantly, exacerbated already tense class divisions on both the battle lines and home
front. Next, it will discuss the way in which these widening class divisions resulted in
insurrections amongst the lower ranks of society and will utilise the example of the infamous
Food Riots. Finally, it will discuss the way in which women of all classes encouraged and
facilitated military desertion in the latter years of the war. It will conclude that although
women created situations which damaged the war effort, they were driven by the
weaknesses of the Confederate leadership.
The usefulness of a discussion of how women damaged the war effort would be
limited without examining why women went from "Angels of the Confederacy" to subversive
agents. In this respect, this paper will build upon the work of historians such as Drew Faust
and George Rable. Their arguments, that female patriotism started to wean as the war crept
more into their lives, has been largely accepted by scholars of gender. This loss of patriotism,
coupled with frustration at the new roles they were expected to fulfil in the absence of their
men folk, led to female dissent.
Whilst this work shall largely accept this line, it shall diverge in one major respect.
Faust postulates that women began to lose their sense of nationalism in the summer of 1863,
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