Women and Dixie: The Feminization of Southern Women's History and Culture

Abstract

In the early 1980s, when I spent some months raking through the Louisiana State and Tulane University archives reading unpublished materials by southern women writers about the Civil War, I was astonished by the weight of that material and the fact it had rarely been examined. As I completed my own research, Anne Goodwyn Jones published her path-breaking study, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981), which charted connections between southern women and began to demonstrate a lineage of their writings which burgeoned around that most significant war. I was also sharing an office with one of the researchers for the mammoth project focused on Mary Boykin Chesnut, led by C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, which resulted in two major tomes, between 1981 and 1984, of her edited diaries and a biography of the writer. The recognition of the importance of Chesnut was a timely reminder of women's complex role in subsequent interpretations and understandings of the Civil War and its aftermath, opening scholarly doors to lesser known figures such as Belle Boyd, Sherwood Bonner, Augusta Evans, Frances Harper, and Mary Johnston, whose war writings (be they life histories, diaries, or fiction) were edited and reprinted for new markets. The recent vogue for life writings of all kinds, besides favoring slave and freedwomen's narratives, as well as conventional autobiographical writings by established writers such as Ellen Glasgow, has given particular prominence to the journals and diaries of white 61ite women who wrote their versions of wartime and Reconstruction