Mothers of Invention - by Drew Gilpin Faust (Paperback)

About the Book

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

Book Synopsis

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain.

Review Quotes

"Faust has the sensibility that I most admire in a historian: the capacity to enter imaginatively into a world very different from our own and to write about it with understanding and sympathy even when we find that world morally abhorrent."
-- "Gordon S. Wood, "Wall Street Journal"

"A dramatically revealing study of how the war altered these women's identities.
(Josephine Humphreys, "New York Times Book Review")"

"Faust makes a major contribution to both Civil War historiography and women's studies in this outstanding analysis.
("Publishers Weekly")"

"It is one of the most admirable recent volumes of American social history.
("Booklist")"