Over the past fifty years gender has become a significant category of historical analysis across various disciplines. The study of gender has altered traditional narratives of the antebellum and postbellum United States, which typically privileged the elite white male perspective. Gender histories have, instead, highlighted the experiences of previously marginalized groups such as free black women, enslaved black women, poor white women, and elite white women. There have also been analyses looking at the role of manhood for whites and blacks of different social and economic classes and how it shaped their everyday and Civil War experiences.

I am primarily interested in how historians have situated gender in the nineteenth century United States and how these innovative perspectives have transformed the understanding of gender norms.

The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender highlights the issue of white male gender and race and its relation to the idea of Southern “manhood.” LeeAnn Whites contends that while an abundance of scholarship exists on the Civil War, it often neglects that whites, like blacks, have race and “that men have gender and that both have a social history” (7). White men thus fade into “general” history with little attention to their particular experience. Whites aim is to present the experience of white men in their struggle to uphold their manhood during the Civil War and demonstrate how women were an integral part of reconstructing gender roles during and after the war.

White slaveholding men felt particularly emasculated when they lost control over slaves as household dependents. Their defeat on the battlefield exacerbated the feelings of failure and loss of manhood. Emancipation and the Civil War left them with no alternative but to restructure their self-identity and masculinity. Whites argues that women did not suffer from these feelings as intensely because their gendered identity had previously revolved around their subordinate position to the men in their lives. In an attempt to motivate and support their “hapless husbands” southern women allowed a “relinquishment of their own sense of self in the name of “larger” interests of their men and their families” (150). These larger interests included intensifying their subordination “to the needs of their men’s egos” in order to push their husbands forward.

White males were not the only people affected by the need to master slaves. Kirsten E. Wood’s monograph, Masterful Women, demonstrates that slaveholding widows “developed a distinctive vision of mastery, which harnessed ladyhood and privileged both over mere white manhood” (6). Slaveholding widows were pushed into this role when their husband’s died and they were left to manage the family estate. Wood describes the various coping mechanisms that widows utilized in order to create a balance between their ladyhood and mastery. Despite the gender roles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, widows’ constructed a path to mastery that was not completely distinctive from that of slaveholding men—they walked on both sides of the gender divide.

The Civil War was a decisive moment for widows’ just as it was for slaveholding men. Slaveholding widows’ had to adjust their plantation management in the midst of “mass death, economic devastation, redoubled slave resistance and emancipation, Union invasion and newly overt class conflict” (159). Even wealthy slaveholding widows’ who did not face the destruction of less fortunate families, had to adjust to performing chores that they saw as beneath them. The eventual abolition of slavery forced slaveholding widows’ to redefine their ladyhood. They could no longer rely on slaves for their “dirty” work. The failure of the institution that had helped define their ladyhood now challenged their identity and social standing. Slaves demarcated widows’ as ladies thus the abolition of slavery called for new standards of ladyhood.

Whites and Wood’s monographs both focus primarily on how gender shaped the experience of whites during and after the Civil War. Though blacks do enter their stories, they are by no means central characters. Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom moves away from the emphasis on the white experience and highlights the lives of nineteenth century bondspeople. She argues that the experience of female slaves can best be understood through the analysis of subtle forms of everyday resistance because they were less likely to be involved in overt forms of rebellion such as running away or physical violence. Camp situates resistance through the geography of containment—essentially how space should be used and the spatial boundaries enforced by masters. Bondspeople frequently disagreed with their masters’ ideas of appropriate spatial boundaries and thus found ways to redefine these spaces for their needs and desires. Outlawed slave parties were one way that “enslaved women and men struggled against planters’ inclination to confine them, in order to create the space and time to celebrate and enjoy their bodies as important personal and political entities in the plantation South” (92).

The aforementioned monographs centralize the importance of the Civil War as a turning point for Southern gendered identity. Changes wrought by the war affected the lifestyles of both men and women of all social, economic, and racial categories. Wood and Whites provide a glimpse into these changes—dealing with identity, status, masculinity, ladyhood, etc.—while Camp introduces ways in which bondspeople existed outside of the confines of their enslaved status. Together these studies illustrate how gender adds new dimensions to narratives that were prone to homogenizing the Civil War experience through sectionalism instead of highlighting the diversity of gender, class, and racial experiences.

If I write my exam on this topic I can add: (If not, review for ORALS)

• Anne Scott, The Southern Lady
• Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors
• Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Battle Scars
• Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage
• Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War”
• Walter Johnson, “On Agency”
• Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism”
• Michael E. Woods, “What Twenty-first century historians have said about the causes of Disunion”