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In antebellum society, women were regarded as ideal nurses because of their sympathetic natures. However, they were expected to exercise their talents only in the home; nursing strange men in hospitals was considered inappropriate, if not indecent. Nevertheless, in defiance of tradition, Confederate women set up hospitals early in the Civil War and organized volunteers to care for the increasing number of sick and wounded soldiers. As a fledgling government engaged in a long and bloody war, the Confederacy relied on this female labor, which prompted a new understanding of women’s place in public life and a shift in gender roles. Challenging the assumption that Southern women’s contributi...
From the William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine.
Born into a male-dominated society, southern women often chose to support patriarchy and their own celebrated roles as mothers, wives, and guardians of the home and humane values. George C. Rable uncovers the details of how women fit into the South's complex social order and how Southern social assumptions shaped their attitudes toward themselves, their families, and society as a whole. He reveals a bafflingly intricate social order and the ways the South's surprisingly diverse women shaped their own lives and minds despite strict boundaries. Paying particular attention to women during the Civil War, Roble illuminates their thoughts on the conflict and the threats and challenges they faced and looks at their place in both the economy and politics of the Confederacy. He also ranges back to the antebellum era and forward to postwar South, when women quickly acquiesced to the old patriarchal system but nonetheless lived lives changed forever by the war.
Vol 1 905p Vol 2 961p.
Charles A. Bear's An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution was a work of such powerful persuasiveness as to alter the course of American historiography. No historian who followed in studying the making of the Constitution was entirely free from Beard's radical interpretation of the document as serving the economic interests of the Framers as members of the propertied class. Forrest McDonald's We the People was the first major challenge to Beard's thesis. This superbly researched and documented volume restored the Constitution as the work of principled and prudential men. It did much to invalidate the crude economic determinism that had become endemic in the writing of Ame...