Women in the Civil War

The purpose of this research is to examine the status of women who lived in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee during the Civil War. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the experience of women of that region was shaped by events in the US in the mid-19th century and then to discuss, with reference to documents generated from the period, ways in which women were obliged to adapt to a situation in which men in their prime were essentially absent, owing to their commitment to resolving the war between the states, with a view toward showing that the experience and behavior of the women in this part of the country were more concerned with local and family issues than with the grand designs of either Union or Confederate priorities.

The geography of the region--eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina take in the part of the Appalachian region known as the Great Smoky Mountains--had the effect of isolating the settlers in the area from the context of the slave-holding South. A number of sources make reference to the social effects of the region's geography. In the introduction to an annotated diary from what the editor calls a yeoman farmer of western North Carolina, for example, the reference is to "the hermetic world of Appalachian North Carolina" and to "the [] hermeticism of the mountain hollows and Thomasson's [the farmer's] hardscrabble day-to-day existence." The area is fertile and not inaccessible, being served

Related Essays

Jewish Women In Civil War .... to policy makers after the Bull Run dispatch." In conclusion, we can see that the experiences of Jewish women in the South during the Civil War reveal much .... (2111 8 )

Female Soldiers in the American Civil War .... Images of women during the American Civil War often depict women as Florence Nightingale-type nurses, spies who used their womanly wiles to navigate between .... (1902 8 )

Civil War and Reconstruction .... Women actually advanced significantly during the Civil War and Reconstruction but these gains were primarily in the medical field. .... (1874 7 )

The Women's War Memorial .... Images of women during the American Civil War often depict women as Florence Nightingale-type nurses, spies who used their womanly wiles to navigate between .... (1908 8 )

Texan for Independence & Civil Rights in Texas .... Such attitudes toward Mexicans, blacks and even women would continue .... The Civil Rights Movement in Texas during the 1940 .... and female participation in World .... II .... (1055 4 )

Jobs and food were rarities for all social classes in the overcrowded cities that were teeming with refugees, but the poor�both whites and free blacks with little or no resources to buffer them�suffered most. The number of women-led households trying to survive on a Confederate soldier's pay increased, causing many among the middle classes and yeomanry to face hunger. . . . To further exacerbate the food crisis, the Confederate military impressed wagons and other vehicles normally used to transport food. The aggravating influence of commodities speculation and profiteering may easily be inferred, since Salisbury modeled similar incidents in other southern cities, including Richmond, two weeks after the Salisbury incident. In 1864, five women got five-month jail terms for their part in raiding the flour. But the prospect of arrest would have been unlikely to deter them because they had exhausted their options. The women had sought relief via petitions to government but had received no joy. Harper's interpretation is that these incidents illustrated a class-based cleavage between the working and affluent classes. As she explains: [A]s both poor and yeoman farm women struggled to keep their children and elderly relatives from s

Category: History - W