Mothers of Invention - (Civil War America (Paperback)) by Drew Gilpin Faust (Paperback)

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

"A dramatically revealing study of how the war altered these women's identities. . . . I read with unanticipated fascination, spellbound by the gathered voices, their passion and stamina, their gifts of introspection and observation. . . . [Faust looks] directly at the past, with a daughter's hard, steady gaze, and with a daughter's generous heart."--Josephine Humphreys, "The New York Times Book Review"

"A wonderfully researched chronicle of a largely unexamined social elite that enriches the fields of Civil War and women's studies. . . . This is a fine, caring social history that also offers surprising insights into the development of the southern American woman's consciousness."--"Kirkus Reviews"

"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, "The Wall Street Journal"

"Faust makes a major contribution to both Civil War historiography and women's studies in this outstanding analysis. . . . [A] provocative analysis of a complex subject."--"Publishers Weekly"

"Faust recreates a society in the depths of social, military, and economic disintegration, and shows its corrosive effect upon the morals and manners of white Southerners who were members of the elite. . . . She has created a remarkable portrait of upper-class Confederate women's wartime experience, and done so with an economy of words and a spirit of engagement that places her work among the finest of recent histories of American women."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The New York Review of Books"