Women of the Slaveholding South in the American

In Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust writes about women and their experiences during the Civil War. When Confederate men marched off to battle, white women across the South confronted new responsibilities. These responsibilities included tasks such as directing farms, supervising their slaves who were becoming more and more impatient and excited about gaining their freedom, and simply working to earn money which they desperately needed in order to provide the basic needs of their children. Southern women struggled to do most of these tasks because they were considered things that only men were capable of doing. Privileged women of the South had to face these challenges because that was their only way of surviving at a time when a huge portion of the society’s male population left their families to go to war. Women of the South had mixed feelings about their loved ones leaving and joining the war. Some of them looked at it as it was their duty as a mother or a wife to give up their loved ones. These women had come to believe that the very value of these men was inseparable from their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the cause they deeply believed in. Women like Sarah Lawton of Georgia celebrated the opportunities the war provided to make men more manly. According to her “something was needed to wake men from their effeminate habits” and she welcomed war for that (15). On the other hand, the call for soldiers deeply troubled many women who anticipated that their husbands and sons are more likely to meet their death rather than glory on the