Faust Women Before The Civil War Summary

Drew Giplin Faust grew up in Virginia during the 1950’s. During these times it was considered disrespectful to call adult white females, “women”, but instead they preferred to be addressed as “ladies”. Drew Faust found this idea to be vexatious and since Faust’s mother (Catherine Mellick) was a firm advocate of this idea, this built a lot of tension and strife between the two. Drew responded by not only refusing to wear dresses but also dismissed the idea of joining women’s social clubs, and all other things that were known to be accustomed to females. Instead Faust decided to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. Faust’s purpose for writing Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War stemmed from her experiences
The evidence used to give insight into this period of time comes from newspapers, books, government documents, the diaries, letters, and memoirs of five hundred southern women. In Faust’s writings she shows the changing sense of self identity that Confederate women experienced as they dealt with a war fought on their own yards. The issues that came up due to war forced southern women to become "mothers of invention". At the end of the war women left from being behind the senses at home but taking on a more public role in
73). Faust writes of the continued issues faced by southern women, "Confederate women fled from the responsibility of empowerment into the reassuring safety of tradition's protective shelter" (p. 211) and this is shown with the description of Benjamin Butler's General Order No. 28 in New Orleans. To stop women's insulting behavior toward Union soldiers and maintain order in the city, Butler proclaimed his intention to treat all offending women as he would prostitutes. Butler recognized the public power of women, and controlled them by threatening their identities as ladies, that was all it took for women to stop the