Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss by Angela Esco Elder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss by Angela Esco Elder Libra R. Hilde (bio) Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss. By Angela Esco Elder. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 224. $95.00 cloth; $27.95 paper; $21.99 ebook) The Civil War created 200,000 Confederate widows. Angela Esco Elder uses personal narratives, print, and popular-culture sources to explore the social vision and expectations of widows, their heightened political clout, and their diverse responses to loss. "Because society invested widowhood with so much significance, it inadvertently created the stage upon which an unforeseen and unprecedented number of young Confederate women could be seen and heard," Elder writes (p. 2). While Elder includes working-class women, the sources favor elite white women. Love and Duty traces the emotional contours of widow's lives and the political significance of their mourning rituals, which took on increased salience as leaders sought legitimacy for the Confederacy. Widows had a public role to play, and they expected reciprocal rewards. The staggering level of male death in a highly patriarchal society makes this an important study. As wives became widows, they displayed a range of reactions, with some upholding social ideals and others falling short. A selfless widow wore proper mourning attire, found refuge in motherhood and religion, and devoted herself to her husband's memory and to the Confederacy. Widows' behavior mattered, and they "became walking embodiments of sacrifice for their communities" (p. 81). Elder probes the variety of lived experience as these women navigated financial, material, and emotional distress. She interweaves moving individual narratives throughout the book. Chapter two contains an especially strong section on written intimacy as letters became increasingly important and unguarded amidst prolonged separations. This book poses intriguing questions, though Elder's answers sometimes remain unsubstantiated. Elder notes that some wives in abusive marriages likely felt relief when a husband died but [End Page 82] provides no evidence to back up this statement. In addition, the historiography is incomplete. Elder cites Confederate Reckoning (2010) but should explicitly note that she is building on Stephanie McCurry's argument about the unintended ramifications of symbolically including women in the framing of the Confederate experiment. Contrary to Elder's claim, historians have not portrayed southern women as a monolith. She shows tensions within families and across generations, but misses the opportunity to fully address the historiography on class divides and shifting gender roles even as the patriarchy survived. As they reconstructed their lives, widows wielded their social capital to petition the government for aid. Widows who visibly endorsed the Confederacy were more successful, meaning that those in the border states faced added hardships. Because they had "political power," mounting deaths amplified concern over the "sexually promiscuous widow" (pp. 107, 103). Most of the lengthy examples present model widows or those who grieved too deeply rather than in a politically problematic way. The book would benefit from extended first-person stories of those who upended expectations. In the postwar period, widows continued to invoke their special status to seek support. Elite widows could become celebrities devoted to memorializing their deceased husbands. However, Elder suggests that many impoverished widows had little time or energy for memorial work. Those most active in memorial associations were married or widowed after the war, and thus Elder contends that "white women did not seamlessly work together to create a Lost Cause ideology" (p. 132). She raises astute questions about widows' anemic participation, but the evidence is thin. Moreover, not working for something is not the same as working against it. Did these women speak out against the Lost Cause, even privately? Once again, the detailed stories highlight publicly active widows. If "grief, and grieving rituals, could be simultaneously compliant and oppositional," Elder needs examples of oppositional behavior from real women and [End Page 83] not just the fictional Scarlett O'Hara. Was this open opposition or an inability or refusal to actively engage? Libra R. Hilde LIBRA R. HILDE teaches history at San José State University. She is the author of Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South...