A year into the Civil War, Clara Solomon wrote, "Necessity and war is the mother of invention." Confederate women knew exactly what the New Orleans teenager meant.

Since the Union greatly outnumbered its Southern foe, the Confederate army drafted heavily. Three out of four white Southern men marched against the North, leaving their women to face a new enemy on the home front: independence.

In the prewar South, white men were seen as the providers and the protectors. So when the majority of Southern men mobilized for military service, Confederate "ladies" were forced to deal with the duties the soldiers left behind. There were crops to manage, slaves to discipline, and other "male" chores to perform.

Reluctantly, women took on the roles normally relegated to men. In a sense, they invented new concepts of responsibility and gender. Necessity and war left them no other choice.

In "Mothers of Invention" (The University of North Carolina Press), Drew Gilpin Faust, Annenberg professor of history, examines how the Civil War changed the "white, privileged women" of the South. When the cannons quieted in 1865, these women had lost more than a war, lost more than loved ones. They had lost a way of life.

A Southerner herself, Dr. Faust knows all about Southern ideals of "ladyhood"--and the Civil War. Born and raised in Shenandoah, Va., she spent her youth visiting historical battlefields. Her family took frequent trips to these sites.

"From where I lived in Shenandoah, you could get to a dozen different battlefields," she said. "They were an omnipresent force in my childhood."

While these visits spurred Dr. Faust's interest in the Civil War, they gave her no love for battle. In college, she protested the Vietnam War and rallied for civil rights.

An admitted history buff, Dr. Faust pursued this field in graduate school. Given her preoccupation with war and race relations, she decided to specialize in the Civil War.

Despite the subject matter of her new book, Dr. Faust never set out to be a "woman's historian." The inspiration for "Mothers of Invention" actually came when she was researching other books on the Civil War. As she read diaries and letters of Confederate women, she heard a voice that, in her opinion, had never been adequately analyzed.

"I felt that the writing I had seen about women in the Civil War was not convincing, was not true to the experience that seemed to me to come out of the documents I was seeing," she said.

Dr. Faust published "Altars of Sacrifice" in the Journal of American History in 1988. The article related the experiences of white, wealthy Confederate women. It was just the beginning.

"I realized after I wrote that article that every paragraph could be a chapter," Dr. Faust said. "There was so much more to explore."

She headed south in 1989 to search for more material in public repositories and libraries. "I went to every Confederate state but Arkansas. But I did find material about Arkansas in other repositories."

She pored over the journals and correspondences of Southern women, who, according to Dr. Faust, traded autonomy for safety. Southern men defended them, provided for them, yet kept them segregated from certain activities, such as politics and business. Dr. Faust describes this unwritten, yet understood, prewar arrangement as "dependence in return for protection." When the Civil War removed the male portion of the equation, women had to compensate the difference. "They weren't getting the protection, so they couldn't dare risk the dependence," Dr. Faust said.

Even after the war, gender roles didn't shift back to their previous positions. Many Southern men died in battle. And women lost confidence in the survivors because they had failed as protectors.

From a feminist's viewpoint, the experience might seem uplifting: No longer reliant upon men, women were finally free to explore new opportunities. But these women didn't see things that way. They didn't welcome the changes. The war left them destitute. Emancipation stripped them of their perceived racial superiority. And work was seen as drudging, not liberating.

"They didn't go into the workplace because this allowed them to fulfill themselves, but because their husbands were unable to work or had been killed," Dr. Faust said. "I think that the burden outweighed the benefits in most cases."

In most cases, not all. Some women did make the best of a bad situation. They became involved in the temperance movement. They wrote literature. Ultimately, they rallied for the right to vote. Overall, however, the North provided a better climate for feminism.

"I make this argument toward the end of the book," Dr. Faust said. "We can see the difference between Northern and Southern feminism, and that kind of lukewarm reception modern feminism has received in the South. You can see some of the origins of that in the Civil War experiences of white Southern women.

"Susan B. Anthony eloquently expressed the notion that nothing is impossible," she continued. "White women of the South knew things were impossible. They had an experience of defeat, an experience of responsibility that they felt was burdensome. So I think they were imbued with a less-optimistic vision of the possible. That very well may have inhibited the progressive movement toward feminism. And the questions of privilege based in race may have become more important for some of them, as they recognized that whiteness brought them many privileges, and that may have been more important to hang on to than to fight for gender privileges."

The Civil War also made many Southern men pessimistic. They had ventured into battle and lost. Their reputation as fighters had been tarnished. Depressed, impoverished, once-powerful men turned to drink. They harbored deep resentments that surfaced with deadly consequences.

"I think a lot of the violence of the postwar South--such as the Klan and lynching--are efforts to assert white manhood," Dr. Faust said. "It's a way of putting down black men, and therefore emphasizing the traditional racial divides. It's a way of putting down white women, saying, 'Look. You're dependent. You need our protection.' ... So it both reasserts this ideology of protection and female dependence, and of black inferiority and subordination."

To some extent, Southern women welcomed the Klan; they believed that the group would bring back social order. But they didn't condone lynching. They even formed organizations to fight it.

"They became the first articulate voice saying, 'This is not helping. This is not in our best interest,' " Dr. Faust said.

This isn't to suggest that all Southern women were humanitarians. They weren't abolitionists, and they certainly weren't concerned with the well-being of former slaves. If anything, they were concerned with the damage that lynching did to the South's image.

"There's a sense that Southern society is disordered, and [lynching] is contributing to the stigma being placed against Southern society by the rest of the world," Dr. Faust said. "It's hurting all of Southern society; it's hurting white society as well as black society."

For all of their efforts, however, Southerners could not restore "order." The Civil War had forever changed their society, and the gender roles of the prewar South could not be regained. As Lucy Buck of Virginia noted in her diary in 1862, "We shall never any of us be the same as we have been."

This didn't stop Southerners from trying. Long after the war, Southern men continued to cling to their role as protectors, even though the truth was something else entirely. Even today, reality and perception clash in many Southern families. Dr. Faust knows this from personal experience.

"In my family, my grandmother from Tennessee is clearly the most-powerful figure," she said. "And my father, my uncle and other men in the family kind of skittered around her, trying not to displease her. Yet, at the same time, there was this ideology that women were subordinate, men were powerful, women should be docile, men should operate in the world. So there's a contradiction between reality and rhetoric, in which men should be powerful, but there are all of these extraordinarily powerful women."

Return to Compass Features for March 5, 1996