Some Thoughts on Mary Elizabeth Massey

Abstract

Some Thoughts on Mary Elizabeth Massey Joan E. Cashin (bio) How do we assess the paradox of Mary Elizabeth Massey? Her academic career combined original research, high productivity, perseverance, and some deeply conventional social and political attitudes. Born in 1915 in Morrillton, Arkansas, she obtained her doctorate in 1947 at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill under the guidance of Fletcher Green. For most of her career, she taught at Winthrop College in South Carolina. Despite a heavy teaching load, she published three monographs when many historians went their entire careers without publishing one, and she published quickly, with three books emerging between 1952 and 1966: Ersatz in the Confederacy, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, and Bonnet Brigades. Moreover, she was a woman in a profession dominated by men, and before her death in 1974, she never quite received the recognition she was due. Since her death, all of her books have been reissued, and most scholars now acknowledge that she was a pioneer of American social history.20 Massey was a dedicated researcher and a very talented writer. She examined an enormous array of primary sources, and she created richly detailed narratives written in clear, readable prose. She was also daring in her choice of [End Page 409] topics. In Bonnet Brigades, she focused on women’s lives when few historians did so; she addressed subjects that most historians shied away from until the 1980s—such as sexuality, adultery, and prostitution—and she discussed female soldiers in both armies, a topic largely ignored by scholars until the 1990s. Ersatz in the Confederacy anticipated the current interest in material culture and the physical environment, the chapter titles reading like today’s research agenda: “Food and Drink,” “Clothing,” and “Housing and Household Goods.” Refugee Life, published in 1964, is probably her best monograph. She covered not just refugees but civilians in general—urban life, medicine, crime, journalism, and other subjects. She presented well-crafted capsule biographies of individual women, such as Kate Stone of Louisiana, and how they experienced their peregrinations. Massey’s war was a saga of adventure, misadventure, and suffering. When it ended, she observed, refugees, like soldiers, had been “away ‘at war.’”21 Yet Massey repeated one of the war’s hoariest myths: that of the white southern people united behind the Confederate cause. Her native state, Arkansas, and the state where she earned her doctorate, North Carolina, contained many unionists, but in her books she did not discuss the war’s causes or why anyone would oppose the conflict. In Ersatz in the Confederacy, she conflated the words “southern” and “Confederate,” giving scant attention to white southern unionists; although she stated that she deliberately excluded them from Refugee Life, they pop up sporadically in the narrative, anyway. (What would Freud say?) In Bonnet Brigades, she argued that most white southern women supported secession, and that after 1861 all of them wanted to support the C.S.A. Pro-Union spies, such as Pauline Cushman, rate a few pages, but Massey did not treat unionists as a distinct group with their own history. Nor did she follow through on her own findings that a substantial number of whites in both regions opposed the war effort.22 Her work on gender is filled with similar tensions and contradictions. In Bonnet Brigades, which included northern and southern women, she seemed fascinated by unorthodox, resilient figures such as Anna Dickinson and Elizabeth Meriwether. When she declared that southerners and northerners had a great deal in common, she obviously meant white women. She [End Page 410] devoted one chapter to black women, including Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, whom she praised for their war work, yet she wrote that slave women were “indifferent” to their children and “welcomed” emancipation until they realized it carried “greater responsibilities” than those they knew as slaves. (Truth’s “Arn’t I a Woman” speech, which Massey did not cite, fully expressed her grief for the children she lost while enslaved in New York.) The black southern woman “gained relatively more” from the war than her northern counterpart, Massey finally conceded. The generalizations about slave women, coupled with her grudging acknowledgment of the great achievement of...