The Strange Careers of Elite Women in the New South

Abstract

Jane Turner Censer investigates the complex responses of Southern white women to the devastation of war and the rise of the New South, correcting depictions of these women as ardent Confederate sympathizers, clinging desperately to the Lost Cause and the racial and sexual prerogatives it offered them.' While many scholars have focused on white women in the antebellum and Civil War South, no full-length study has described these same women after Appomattox. Consequently, historians know little about their ordinary reactions to the profound dislocations that followed the war. In The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, Censer argues that the Civil War permanently transformed many Southern ladies into independent women with previously unthinkable goals and desires. She also contends that some privileged women questioned the South's emerging racial order, a provocative if not entirely convincing point that deserves further investigation. Censer focuses on women in North Carolina and Virginia, two states that allow her to generalize persuasively about the South as a whole. While Virginia, home to the capital of the Confederacy, saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war, battles barely scathed North Carolina's soil. But both states lost large numbers of men, a fact that had enormous consequences for women once the fighting ceased. Containing industrial, cottonand rice-producing, and mixed farming regions, the two states were also microcosms of the broader Southern economy. Censer examines the old elite of these regions, including members of leading slaveholding families such as the descendents of Chief Justice John Marshall in Fauquier County, Virginia. This emphasis is understandable, not only because of the limited sources available to scholars but also because of the social realities of the time. As Censer notes, women's education and status gave them chances denied to others (p. 3-4). In other words, these former belles were the women most likely to exploit the era's new possibilities and best able to challenge the stifling conventions of the past.