A portrait Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, describes her role during the war, her personal conflict over the war, and her life following the conflict and her husband's death in 1889.

Product Description: Though civilians constituted the majority of the nation's population and were intimately involved with almost every aspect of the war, we know little about the civilian experience of the Civil War. That experience was inherently dramatic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Enhanced by excerpts from primary documents as well as numerous illustrations, this collection of essays by some of the country’s most prominent Civil War historians intends to move women to the center stage of Civil War history. Topics range from the experiences of female slave contrabandists, to the lives of rural refugee women, to the effects of the postwar era on African-American women, to the Civil War’s legacy in women’s suffrage movements...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: We know little about the lives and thoughts of white women in the antebellum South, and for many years students of the period have waited for a broadly based sampling of their writings. In Our Common Affairs, supplying this need, Joan E...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This book is about the different ways that men and women experienced migration from the Southern seaboard to the antebellum Southern frontier. Based upon extensive research in planter family papers, Cashin studies how the sexes went to the frontier with diverging agendas: men tried to escape the family, while women tried to preserve it. On the frontier, men usually settled far from relatives, leaving women lonely and disoriented in a strange environment. As kinship networks broke down, sex roles changed, and relations between men and women became more inequitable. Migration also changed race relations, because many men abandoned paternalistic race relations and abused their slaves. However, many women continued to practice paternalism, and a few even sympathized with slaves as they never had before. Drawing on rich archival sources, Cashin examines the decision of families to migrate, the effects of migration on planter family life, and the way old ties were maintained and new ones formed.