Confederate Women

"Southern women of the 1860's, as here revealed with the help of their own letters and diaries, were decidedly not the clinging vines described in romantic writings of later years. In a very real sense, the tragic Civil War was, for the Confederates, a women's war. Women were ardent in advocating secession. Women were indefatigable in running farms and families and infirmaries while their men fought. Throughout the hopeless war, the women conducted themselves in ways that earned the solid respect of their men, and in ways that won for women the first measured gains toward equality ... Bell Irvin Wiley writes at length of such exemplary Confederate women, Mary Boykin Chesnut, a genuine intellectual who became the wife of a senator and military aide to Jefferson Davis; Virginia Tunstall Clay, whose husband (a U.S. senator and then a Confederate senator) was, after Lincoln's assassination, held at Fort Monroe for a year without trial; and Varina Howell Davis, the aristocratic First Lady of the Confederacy"--Jacket.