Poor White Women in the Confederacy

Abstract

Poor white women and children hawking goods and traveling the roads in carts was not a new sight during the Civil War, but it did take on a different resonance in this context. How poor white women fit or were to be incorporated into a war for slavery garnered more concern from slaveholders, government, and military officials as the war progressed. Their increased visibility as dissenters from the Confederate project caused problems; they got into conflicts with other white, female refugees, engaged in outright resistance, and sided with poor and working-class white men who did not want to fight for or deserted the Confederacy. Calls for white southerners to unite across class lines began to fall apart as the war went on partly because of the disproportionate demands placed on poor and working-class women became untenable for many. The worlds of poor white women and slaveholding female refugees also began to overlap, emphasizing the dissimilarity of these women’s experiences. The politics of poor and nonslaveholding white Southern women was grounded in the particularities of their political economy and social worlds.