Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War Reviews

• 
  Kressel Housman

  I first heard of this book when the author, the first female president of Harvard University, was interviewed on Freakonomics Radio. Originally from the South, she was raised with the expectation to be “a lady.” She completely defied it by doing the unladylike thing of raising farm animals alongside her brothers. She sounded like another Nelle Harper Lee, except she chose academia instead of novel-writing. Her book examines the lives of an earlier set of Southern ladies: the generation of white women whose husbands and sons fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
  
  The author claims that the book is meant for lay audiences and not academics, but as you’d expect from the president of Harvard, the book was somewhat academic in tone. Though it’s not especially long – about 250 pages without the footnotes – it was rather a heavy read. Each chapter addressed a different facet of life and how it was impacted by the war. Unsurprisingly, the biggest change was in relation to the slaves. Without men around to enforce the women’s commands with the threat of a whip, there was plenty of “insubordination” and plain old running away. One woman lost all her slaves in one fell swoop. They just up and left, and there was nothing she could do about it.
  
  The result of this was that these upper class white women were forced for the first time in their lives to perform their own domestic and even farm work. For the most part, they failed at it. But as the title suggests, necessity is the mother of invention, so even though these women didn’t always rise to the circumstances with great competence, they did develop more independence. In that way, the Civil War upended the traditional role of “ladies.” After the war, though, most women were only too happy to try and regain the pre-war race and class structure, except now they had to pay servants instead of owning slaves.
  
  My very favorite chapter was on how central reading and writing were to these women’s lives during the war. That humanized them, and this was a group most of us wouldn’t feel much sympathy for. The chapter on the vocation of nursing was my second favorite. Most white Southern women did not follow in the path of Florence Nightingale, though she did make nursing a respectable vocation for women. Before her, it was considered inappropriate because it involved too much intimacy with male bodies. The nursing of wounded soldiers until then was carried out by permanently wounded soldiers or by men of lower class. Because of that, most of the nursing of wounded Confederate soldiers was carried out by African Americans, both male and female. And so goes another one of the Civil War’s many ironies.
  
  As the author states in the beginning, most academics do not like to research the history of the oppressors, but as a woman of the South, the subject interested her. She neither demonizes nor idealizes the women; she just presents them as they are, usually in direct quotes from their letters and diaries. Sometimes there seemed to be too many examples to make a single point, but mostly it was remarkably thorough research presented in a fairly readable way. Besides, even if I was bored in spots, who am I to give the president of Harvard less than 5 stars? It wasn’t a fun book, but I learned a lot. Recommended.
• 
  Ioana

  This book, written by Harvard's first female president, offers a historical survey of elite Southern women during the Civil War as read through their letters, diaries, citywide decrees, women's societies, and a variety of other popular and legal sources.
  
  The portrait is not flattering. Faust debunks the myth that many white Southern women centralized production in their homes (war "home-factories"), that they successfully made their own products (i.e., especially cloth), that they managed their plantations well, or that they significantly impacted nursing and other professions.
  
  Essentially, Southern women subscribed to an ideology of helplessness and frailty that relied on white masculinity for its defense. They didn't *want*, for the most part, to be independent--they would have much rather preferred being protected and enclosed in the safe "hoop" of patriarchy.
  
  The Civil War required them to step up into position of independence and assertiveness, and at first, women protested and withdrew. They could barely manage their slaves, resorted to impulsive, emotional outbursts, and otherwise failed (for the most part, though of course there are always exceptions) to transgress existing gender boundaries.
  
  However, by the end of the war, elite white women were tired of relying on a white masculinity that seemed to be failing in protecting their identities. Bitter and disillusioned, they began tentatively constructing their own identities, but not as their "northern sisters" had: more out of spite and anger at conditions, their actions were rooted in the "distinctive" Southern "experience of poverty and failure".
• 
  Indigo Trigg-Hauger

  According to Drew Gilpin Faust, writing about and researching the “history of elites” is a topic that lately has not been considered “fashionable,” but one she takes interest in with her book Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. In Drew’s estimation, the Civil War changed the roles of white women, particularly elite white women, in society. The war altered what kind of work they did, how their marriages functioned, and what they expected of themselves. In her epilogue, Faust connects the changes wrought by the Civil War to the impending “feminist” movement in the South, one that was tied to shared “white unity” with white men.
  
  Faust has a very engaging style because of how heavily she incorporates the writings of Southern women. The mass of diaries, letters, and reports they wrote were clearly instrumental in writing this book, and it would not have been the same without them. Being able to directly reference their deepest thoughts makes it much easier to understand what was going on at the time – though in the back of my mind I could never forget that most of them were slaveholders, and almost assuredly all of them were horribly racist.
  
  Despite the heavy use of good source material though, there are two issues with how Faust supports her argument. First, she seems to have trouble letting the sources speak for themselves. She seems unable to present crucial evidence without saying how “tellingly” or “revealingly” the women are writing. Her interpretation vacillates between too heavy-handed and rather oblivious. At times, therefore, she even contradicts herself, and that is my second issue with the book.
  
  Faust does not always pay attention to the evidence itself. She spends an entire section in Chapter Six writing about the homoerotic relationships between young girls in the South, using primary evidence that in any other context would be considered very romantic and sexual. Quotes like “I dreamed the other night, dear, and I actually thought myself kissing you – when I awoke to find it all an idle dream,” or “I encircled her waist with my own arm, and thought ‘Oh, if her heart could only reciprocate the love which mine could yield to her,’” – these read immediately as romantic relationships. Yet Faust dismisses them out of hand, saying that at the time “such expressions represented a sensitivity and authenticity of feeling celebrated in this sentimental mid-Victorian era as appropriate to true friendship as much as true love.” Why could both not exist simultaneously? All the evidence Faust presents up to that point seems to say bisexual and lesbian relationships were alive and well, which is an interesting part of history we rarely see (no doubt in part due to the erasure those groups receive in society today). Faust seems to contradict herself in then saying these explicitly erotic dreams and actions between women were nothing more than friendship.
  
  Similarly, it becomes difficult to follow or take seriously Faust’s argument when she flip flops between her arguments regarding working women. First she spends nearly a whole chapter (Chapter Four) writing about how elite, white women went to work, particularly in hospitals. She evidences many letters and diary entries about women unexpectedly taking on this dirty work, and even implicitly praises them for it. (Faust’s seeming admiration for these white women of the South is something I also take issue with, but there’s not enough space here to address it.) But toward the end of the chapter, she suddenly changes her stance and says “Serious, committed, long-term hospital work remained the domain of these exceptional women.” And, she adds, “For all their undeniable and important contributions, it was not the Confederacy’s ladies but its African Americans who cared for the South’s fallen heroes.” Why not focus more on them, then? Even something more than this tiny, incidental mention at the end of the chapter would have added immensely to whatever she is trying to say.
  
  Again and again this happens, with Faust undecided or conflicted on what she is trying to say. In Chapter Five, she writes extensively and movingly about how the separation of husbands and wives served to strengthen their relationships, making the wives both more independent, and causing both to be more appreciative of each other (as war tends to do). Abruptly toward the end of the chapter though, she suddenly takes a totally different tact, saying, “wives desperately missed the emotional and material support they had taken for granted as their husbands’ obligations.”
  
  In terms of evidence, Faust works with an amazing number of primary sources (in the realm of 500 women, she says), and it shows. The interpretation is severely lacking, though. Faust herself does not seem to know what she wants to say, or what the women themselves felt. And though people are complex, and there certainly may have been a variety of attitudes, the book is worse off for it when Faust simultaneously builds and then destroys her own arguments. I do agree with Faust's initial argument, but the way she attempts to prove it is too roundabout to be effective.
  
• 
  Sarah

  There’s poetry that makes you love poetry, and novels that make you love novels and history books that make you love reading history. And this is one of them – a fascinating, absorbing book about the changes the Civil War wrought on the culture of the American south. Death and hoopskirts and drudgery, fear and self-worth and deprivation and nursing and class wars, expectations, wimping out and grief and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
  
  Anyone with the teensiest inclination to read this shall be rewarded. The war was a huge wake-up call for women in the south, who found out how necessity transforms people. And it was terrible. And it was good.
  
  "In the summer of 1862 Sarah Morgan of Louisiana confided to her diary that she had been considering trying on her absent brother's clothes. Jimmy's suit had been hanging in her armoire for six weeks when at last she was emboldened to remove it. 'I advanced so far,' she reported, 'as to lay it on th bed.' But she turned aside to take her pet bird from the room. 'I was ashamed to let even my canary see me.' When she returned to contemplate the suit, 'my courage deserted me, and there ended my first and last attempt at disguise. I have heard so many girls boast of having worn men's clothes; I wonder where they get the courage.'"
• 
  E B

  This book gives an idea of what the home-front of the Southern side of the American Civil War was like for those who didn't head into battle. The home-front in the south was largely female and many found themselves forced to take on roles only their male counterparts had ever partaken. This must have been especially hard for the wealthy elite as their way of life was turned upside-down.
• 
  Maura Heaphy Dutton

  Excellent and very well-written research and scholarship. Says a few things that need to be said about the institution of slavery, and the true nature of the Confederacy.
  
  First of all, set aside any "romantic" Scarlett O'Hara-style notions of Confederate ladies as spunky gals who would do anything to support their Boys in Grey, protect their children, and maintain their "way of life." Based on the fantastic array of letters, journals and other writing from every corner of the Confederacy, most of these women were whiny, pathetic and unbelievably lazy. Their social standing meant everything, and their social standing was based upon being weak and fragile "ladies," capable of doing nothing that could be described as real work.
  
  That included looking after their own children. Lizzie Neblett, cited in the book's description as "a housewife facing a life of physical labor for the first time," is forced to look after her own children, when her slaves run away, and writes unapologetically about beating her 10-month-old daughter.
  
  There were exceptions, of course, women who were prepared to risk social ostracism as nurses, joining the ranks of common women and slaves who were considered suitable for such lowly, "demeaning" work. Women who felt liberated by the disruption of the paternalistic system of the antebellum South, as they had to take responsibility for their lives for, perhaps, the first time. Women who began, however, haltingly, to recognize that the evil of slavery had brought them to this.
  
  I have one (relatively minor) criticism: the subtitle, I think, could be misleading. The women Faust focuses on are the women of the slave-holding elite, whose who, in their own eyes, were the "aristocracy" of the South. Their attitude to ordinary, working class Southerners is very revealing of the con that this "masterclass" of slaveowners managed to perpetrate: pursuading those they considered their social inferiors to fight and die for a system that held them down.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  sappho_reader

  Written more as academic than popular non-fiction this book was a tad dry to read but I was interested enough in the subject matter to persevere to the end. Drew Gilpin Faust examined how the roles of affluent Confederate women changed drastically during the Civil War after the men left to serve in the Confederate Army. Restrictions of race, class and gender kept them prim and proper before the war but now they had to manage the plantation and discipline the slaves. And they failed.
  
  Chapter 3 “Enemies in Our Households: Confederate Women and Slavery” was the most interesting section. As the war progressed the agriculture industry in the South suffered and it was not uncommon for slaves to leave. Some mistresses were devastated and perplexed yet they remained completely clueless.
  
  

  Eva Jones was distraught when three female slaves seized their freedom ‘without bidding any of us an affectionate adieu.’
  
  ‘The first & only meal my mother ever cooked’ her daughter Emma Prescott remembered, was the ‘day after the negros all left. Mother went into the kitchen to cook breakfast. She sifted some flour into the tray and stood, thinking what to do next – when an old negro man appeared at the window & said ‘laws mistis is you cooking breakfast.’ ‘No I am not come in here and get it for me’ which he did.’
  
  A Louisiana lady who had 'never even so much as washed out a pocket handkerchief with my own hands' suddenly had to learn to do laundry for her entire family.

  
  
  They had to learn from scratch how to cook and clean after their slaves left. I couldn’t stop laughing and I felt no sympathy for them.
  
• 
  Deede

  Fascinating look at the lives of white slave owning women in the south during the Civil War. Women had been raised to be dependent and helpless. All of a sudden the men all vanished and they had to cope on their own. Along with having to do things their husbands would have taken care of, they had to start doing a lot of the work around the house they were unaccustomed to doing as well as untrained to do. The letters and journals of women across the south weave a fascinating story.
• 
  Brad Hart

  This is an EXCELLENT book from the perspective of women during the Civil War (particularly in the south). The author effectively portrays the plight of widows, wives, children, etc during America's worst war. It sounds like a boring book, but is actually one of the best I have ever read on the Civil War. An excellent read.
• 
  Eileen

  
  
  My friend Lucy is trying her hand at holding traditional salons in her home. At last night's first attempt, this book came up in the grab pile. I lost it to another attendee*, but made sure I added the info to my Goodreads list before she made off with it. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for it as I make my way through a few other recent civil war related titles I picked up at our library book sale next month.
  
  
  
  
  *don't feel too bad for me. I ended up with a great book about Mars, instead.
• 
  Leigh

  Very interesting take on a group of women who are not inherently sympathetic "characters" at all, i.e., women from Southern slaveholding families at the time of the Civil War. But I did learn a lot about how the war changed their lives and about their ambivalence regarding these changes. I felt some measure of empathy with these women's situations. For an academic treatise, this book is very accessible to the lay reader. The fact that it is written by the woman who became the 1st female president of Harvard makes it all the more interesting.
• 
  Eve

  interesting book, but sort of strange to spend all that time discussing male/female roles, cross dressing etc and never once even mention the possibility of lesbian relationships in the south? published 1996, was this so not yet on the radar in academic circles?!? does not one diary or journal ever allude to such possibilities? really?!?
• 
  Michael

  When I was growing up, books about the Civil War were about battles. I was not particularly interested in reading about Civil War battles.
  
  Today I am surprised to understand how much of our present mess is because there was no closure for white southerners after they lost. (I am perhaps not saying that very well.) A book like this, describing the lives of mostly upper class while slave-owning family women during the Civil War, gives interesting insights to their lives then but also to our lives now.
  
  The book is logically organized by topic and there are a number of women who reappear throughout, giving a sense of continuity to the narrative. The most significant examples are drawn from letters and diaries.
  
  The author makes certain points that she suggests vary from what other researchers have documented - for example. she feels there is little evidence that white southern women did much to fill the gap left by imports from other countries or that they had previously purchased from the northern states with home based manufacture. She seems to provide good evidence.
• 
  Fraser Sherman

  The Civil War hit the wealthier white women of the South like a hammer blow. They'd been raised to understand that they had no place in the public sphere: their roles in life were finding husbands and running a home (more precisely, managing the slaves who did the work), in return for which their husbands would support and protect them and make all the decisions. Now suddenly their men were marched off to war, leaving the women defenseless in the event of Yankee incursions or slave uprisings (the latter more a fear than a reality). They had to engage in such unfeminine (in their eyes) activities as managing slaves, running businesses, dealing with Union soldiers and, if they lost their husbands, hunting new lovers rather than going into perpetual mourning. An interesting angle on the war, though not up to Faust's This Republic of Suffering.
• 
  Graham

  A well researched and woven account of Southern ladies in the throws of Confederate decline. Faust makes it look easy as she brings diary and correspondence to the front of the narrative and, like most damning documents of the secession cause, their voices illustrate the principle cog in the wheel of white male planter domination. I wouldn’t normally pickup an academic text reciting the words of the UDC (united daughters of the confederacy) acolytes without more attention drawn to it, but it provided an important sketch of the driving force to protect an imagined cultural caste who provided very little beyond their own vulnerability.
• 
  York

  "Women" here, to be clear, refers to white upper-class women. This is made explicit in the introduction and the book does talk about women siding with race over gender and the construction of the delicate white woman as an argument against emancipation, so I think it has a fair awareness of the non-universality of the word "woman" and the class/race distinctions which that word requires.
• 
  Paula

  An excellent history— I need to read it again when I’m not distracted. I particularly recommend the last few chapters for insight into middle and upper class Southern women and their seemingly contradictory social and political stances after the Civil War.
• 
  Miles Smith

  One of the first important works on womens' and gender history pertaining to the experience of wartime life of southern women.
• 
  Karen

  If you are interested in a book about the Women of the south's experienced during the civil war and how it set us on a path to changing gender and class roles.
• 
  Samuel

  Faust explores the gender role transformations and issues confronted by women in the slaveholding south when the male population (between the ages of 17-55) by and large left their domestic settings (and farms) for war. The Confederacy, more so than the Union in the north, suffered a massive reduction of white males to fight in Civil War battles. Faust cleverly explores the somewhat obvious but often overlooked consequences of this situation and finds a few surprising features along the way. Rather than re-define their roles as on a path demanding to be considered more equivalent with men, southern women in general stove to preserve the gender roles of southern gentility. Surely many women were forced to assume the duties of their husbands in managing plantations in addition to household affairs, but they did not relish the power and often sought the help of male neighbors and male slaves to due things that ladies simply should not do. Many southern women were most terrified of their slaves living in and around their homes, and many expressed desires to free them all if they could: (1) get a fair compensation for their property and (2) keep one female house slave.
  
  Women who had to find work outside the home found their way into professions that women in the north had been occupying for decades: teaching, nursing, etc. (At the beginning of the war 7% of southern schoolteachers were female; by war's end, 50% were female). The changing dynamics of single women, courtship, and widowhood are all addressed by Faust in fairly interesting detail. Many southern wives were naturally terrified of getting pregnant and being left to raise a child without a husband. Finally, many women sought companionship from homosocial interactions in the absence of heterosocial (and heterosexual) contact. Of course, there were instances of infidelity on their behalf as their was on behalf of their counter-parts (war and prostitution often go hand in hand).
  
  These generalizations of course did not apply to all women equally, but the status of a lady and femininity were much more championed and cherished by southern women than say women workers of the WWII era who were more reluctant to relinquish their newfound economic independence upon war's end.
  
  (p. 3-152)
• 
  Kerry

  Give your sons, brothers, uncles, husbands and future husbands to a war that has been sold to you as winnable and God's will.
  
  You've always being protected and now forced to learn how to care for household, children, self and your future self which will most likely be alone.
  
  Watch yourself change over the course seven years, how would you be different? Would you embrace the new world or stubbornly cling to the old world?
  
  Most lamented and stubbornly clung to the old world of privileged womanhood but a few grabbed the petticoats and turned them into umbrellas that lifted them like Mary Poppins into a future they never expected.
• 
  Sophie

  This was so fabulous. Just the way I like my history books--personal, filled with anecdotes and letters, and both intimate and sweeping at the same time. Even this very specific subset of people she chose to focus on (elite, educated slaveholding women during the American Civil War) represented such a range of experiences and impressions. Great to read in my Civil War class which could have so easily touched only on the soldiers' and politicians' experiences. It also inspired me to write my nursing in the Civil War paper, which ended up being my favorite paper I wrote in college.
• 
  Tabitha

  I really wanted this book to be better than it was. It really bothers me that the name of this book is not quite its subject matter. Yes, it is about women of the South's gentry class. But mother's of invention implies an ingenuity--that women of the south needed to find replacements for those items or things or services that the Civil War denied them--that Faust never really demonstrates. It is an interesting read, and it is very informative. But it was not quite what I expected, nor does its 200-some pages really encapsulate the idea promised in the title.
• 
  Christy Tuohey

  Though this book is more of an academic than romantic read, it is the only work I've found that focuses on women during the Civil War. I would love to find a comparable book about women of the the Union, but I suspect that women of that time, no matter which side they were on, experienced many of the same fears and trials. Which, ironically, may make women the unifying force in a divided nation.
  
  The author did meticulous research here and found a treasure trove of letters and other papers from that period. This book is worth reading, especially during this sesquicentennial year.
• 
  Kate

  In a Nutshell: Mothers of Invention is an exploration of women's lives and experiences on the home front in the South during the Civil War.
  
  I loved this book. It was so interested how diverse women's experiences were. Some found their new freedom liberating, some found it stifling; some women frantically searched for husbands, others embraced the opportunity to live out their lives as single. I really liked the exploration of female friendships and the importance of novels and writing.