History has a huge effect on the identity of many people. History can help mold the lives of some people and can completely shape the lives of others. History and identity are directly connected.
“The day was warm for April in 1861 and the golden sunlight streamed brilliantly into Scarlett’s room through the blue curtains of the wide windows. The cream-colored walls glowed with light and the depth of the mahogany furniture gleamed deep red like wine, while the floor glistened as if it were glass, except where the rag rugs covered it and they were spots of gay color” (Mitchell 103). In Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, such a description tells of the luxurious life of Scarlett O’Hara before the Civil War, which would break out the next day. This southern belle, as well as many others all throughout the south never would have imagined their lives would be affected by this war in ways that would change them forever. Mitchell’s novel tells about a woman’s struggle to survive through the Civil War and rebuild afterwards. This war altered the identity of the southern belle in many ways which, in the end, made her a stronger woman when trying to succeed in the New South.
Not only the Civil War, but all historic events have an impact on the lives of people. Sometimes the lives of people are shaped by history even before they are born. In The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates, the life of Rebecca Schwarts is determined by the acts of Nazi Germany in WWII. Her family is forced to flee Germany to escape persecution and she is born on the refugee boat to America, “the only one of the damn family . . . born this side of the ’Lantic Ocean” (Oates Gravedigger’s 67). Being a first generation American was her destiny and she would struggle to overcome poverty and make her way towards happiness and prosperity in America.
Part 1
“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm . . .” (Mitchell 3). Charm was a key part to being one of the often sought after southern belles of the antebellum south. A southern belle was the name given to the young, unmarried daughter of a wealthy, slave-owning plantation family (Seidel 3). When the girls of plantation families reached their mid to late teen years, huge coming-out and presentation parties were thrown to celebrate their passage into womanhood. A girl’s coming-out party was usually given when she was around 15 or 16 years old. Before the party, a transformation make-over would occur and the daughter’s pig tail braids and short skirts were replaced with elegant hoop skirt dresses, the most up-to-date hats, and beautiful hairstyles adopted from European fashion (Edwards 20). This transformation let all the men and boys in the area know that this woman was wealthy and was ready to start looking for a husband. The early life of Rebecca Schwarts was completely opposite. Due to her father’s poor job as the immigrant caretaker of the town cemetery, his family was lucky to afford clothes.
The life of a southern belle was not much unlike that of a princess (Seidel 6). She had very few chores and much leisure time. What chores she did have usually consisted of writing to kin, sewing, and studying the Bible. Besides chores, her daily activities consisted of reading books, writing in her diary, and a lot of daydreaming (Edwards 17). The only arduous task to befall the leisurely life of a belle was to change several times a day in order to show off the family’s wealth, as well as their gorgeous wardrobe (Edwards 19). She was also surrounded by servants, much like a princess. From birth, the girl would be taken care of by a particular black house slave often referred to as a “Mammy’. This slave would follow the child throughout her whole life usually starting out as a wet nurse when the child was an infant and following the girl to her new home once she was married. The mammy raised the child and was constantly attending to her and the other ladies of the house (Clinton 64). The child was always watched over by the slaves of the house and seldom ever was allowed to associate with the ‘riffraff’ in the slave quarters (Clinton 14). Rebecca’s caretaking was overseen by her mother, but more often than not Rebecca looked after herself. She had minimal chores. Cleaning the dirt-floor house was next to pointless and their ragged clothing were the only things worth taking care of.
Education was not much of a concern in the life of a southern belle. In her youth, she was taught to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. Women were not raised to go to college. It was common knowledge among southern men that women had an inferior intellect when it came to anything besides the arts (Seidel 14). Women were believed to have a more gentle and artistic demeanor. Girls were taught to ride and sew, and encouraged to play music and write verse. Southern women were taught to play a variety of instruments, including the piano and the violin. Rebecca was educated through the free public education system. Education was not a very important part of her life or her family’s and her father encouraged all his children to drop out of high school in order to get jobs. Being well versed in the Bible was another stressed lesson. Religion was very important in Southern culture and it was the job of the woman to be the spiritual leader and caretaker of the family (Edwards 19). The main religion followed by Southern plantation families was Evangelical Protestantism (Edwards 18). Religion for the Schwarts family was a forbidden topic. The children were not even allowed to utter the word, ’Jewish’. “Never say it“, their father warned them (Oates Gravedigger’s 90). Girls in Scarlett’s time were prepared by their mothers to become the religious expert of their future husband’s household. Other lessons for southern women were on how to become a lady (Seidel 6). Being ladylike and proper was a very high expectation of all southern belles. Beginning at a young age, proper etiquette and manners were drilled into the heads of girls. Young girls developed social skills and charm which would aid them in attracting a beau (Seidel 4). It was believed that a lady was the only thing “ . . . that stood between a man and the jungle (Seidel 91).”
Eventually a southern belle would marry, and usually the marriage was pre-approved by the parents of both children who often arranged marriages to gain or increase the family’s reputation and wealth. Once in a while, couples would marry for love, but these marriages usually ended in poverty because they were not supported by the families of either child. However, an arranged marriage where the two parties were in love did happen and turn out very prosperous (Edwards 13). When marriages were prosperous, it was not long until the southern belle turned from a princess at her family’s plantation into the queen of her own plantation. Rebecca was never worried about marriage. It was never stressed at an early age, and she would have been happy had she never been married. In Rebecca’s time, it was odd, but not unheard of, for women to never marry.
Life for the wife of plantation owner was not so leisurely. A carefree girl was transformed to a hard working matron, the supervisor of a plantation, a nurse to slaves and servants, and the mother of her own children (Seidel 6). On a plantation, the wife was the main manager. She calculated the finances, paid the bills, and managed the labor. It was the woman’s job to make sure every slave was fed and clothed, and that it fit into a budget (Clinton 16). The husband legally owned the land, sold the crops, dealt with behavioral issues among the labor, and made final decisions over all sales and purchases regarding slaves, livestock, furniture, and frivolities (Edwards 23). However, a man would never admit that it was a woman who ran the plantation behind the scenes. Through all of Rebecca’s life, it was the man who called all the shots. Her father decided their lives, and Rebecca’s first husband also decided many aspects of her and her son’s life.
Southern plantation life was often compared to Victorian life, only the people reacted strongly against the corruption of their society. The Industrial Revolution in the North was looked down upon in the South because many Southerners felt that factories were foolish and that only true character and dignity was found in maintaining a plantation and making their own living growing crops (Seidel 4). Because of this mentality, men believed that being the wife or daughter of a plantation family was of a much higher status than having a paying job, voting, or having other rights (Seidel 8).Women were often confined to the plantation and only left when visiting kin or neighbors (Seidel 25). Plantations were very far apart, and because of the geography, the south was divided into districts and visits often lasted for days at a time (Edwards 11). The home was seen as a safe haven that shielded women from the corruption of the outside world (Seidel 4). It was almost as if women were trapped in their marriages.
It was a man’s world in the South during these times. When a man and a woman married, the Law of Coverture took effect. This law stated that when a man and a woman became married, all the legal rights a woman carried while she was single became the husband’s legal rights and a woman was not permitted to do anything without the approval of her husband. All the possessions of the wife also became the husband’s, including any earnings, property, and slaves (Edwards 12). Also, in the marriage, a woman had virtually no rights. If the husband ended up being abusive, a woman had no protection from the law against him. In order to escape these types of conditions, the only thing a woman could do was go away on visits, frequently invite guests to their home, or stay close the children in order to prevent confrontation (Edwards 26). Divorce was extremely rare and nearly nonexistent. When divorce did occur, it was a divorce filed on behalf of the husband for reasons against his wife and would usually leave her penniless and shamed. When the wife filed for divorce, it was heavily backed by the community because a woman would only file for divorce in the case of extreme circumstances. This type of back-up was also very unusual (Edwards 27). In Rebecca’s life, she left her first husband because he was abusive to her and their child. It was bold for a woman to leave her spouse, but again not unheard of, especially if there was abuse involved, as was the case with Rebecca. A man held no legal rights over a woman at this time and married life for women was much simpler.
Besides all the legal issues, life in general was rough for the families of plantations. For women, there were high infant mortality rates and high chances of death during childbirth. Diseases, such as typhoid, measles, and influenza, were very common in the area and medical care at that time did not offer immunization shots. Many people died of things that are easily taken care because of modern medicine (Edwards 10). In the mid-1900’s, medical advances were much better and diseases did not hold that great of a threat.
Life was surely difficult for a woman in during the antebellum south, but despite all the troubles, it was much easier than being poor. The years during the antebellum south were the golden years of the south. It was a time of beautiful dresses, luxury homes, sweet. fresh food, and wealth. A woman had to consider herself lucky to be in the position she held, and a daughter had to consider herself extremely lucky to a symbol of the best year of the south. However, these women had no idea that their luxurious, bittersweet life would take a turn for the worse in late April of 1861.
However, early life for Rebecca during and after WWII was very difficult. She suffered through poverty, persecution and familial abuse. She had no idea what the life of a princess is lived. As much as Scarlett O’Hara was spoiled and pampered, Rebecca Schwarts was underprivileged and ignored.
Part 2
“The South was intoxicated with enthusiasm and excitement. Everyone knew that one battle would win the war and every young man hastened to enlist before the war should end . . .Trainloads of troops passed through Jonesboro daily on their way North to Atlanta and Virginia . . . The sight of these men through the County boys into a panic for the fear the war would be over before they could reach Virginia, and preparations for the troops departure was speeded” (Mitchell 180).
The Civil war broke out in April of 1861. Many Southerners believed the war would be short and over with in a few months at the most. Patriotism for the confederacy was high and the spirit of war was infectious. Battles would be fought all through the south and many men would die as a result. War is often seen as on being on a battlefield. No one realizes that the home front was affected and war ridden just as much as a battle field. The women didn’t realize this fact either, until it happened to them.
WWII ended and the life of Rebecca Schwarts did not change. War was not something that affected her life drastically. It was the reason she was born in the US and her father couldn’t obtain a better job. The war was affecting her before she was born, but she would tough it out and deal with bigger issues in her later ‘post-war’ life. The next big war she would have to live through would be Vietnam. Vietnam didn’t really effect her life either. It did, however, bring up political disputes between Rebecca’s second husband and his father. Also, it changed the outlook of her son. He became more interested in issues regarding religion, politics, and the world in general.
In the beginning of the Civil War while men were being shipped north to fight, women found themselves just as anxious to help the effort. Southern newspapers gave white women the responsibility of ethical and spiritual morale. A popular newspaper, Southern Field and Fireside asked women, “Can you imagine what would be the moral condition of the Confederate army in six months without a woman’s influence?” The Augusta Weekly Constitutionalist asked “What but a woman makes the Confederate solider a gentlemen of honor, courage, virtue, and truth, instead of a cutthroat vagabond?” (Faust 1204). Women took it upon themselves to provide support from the home front and be the moral support for the men at war.
Women were loyal supporters of the war and took up many tasks to help the war effort (Faust 1203). Provision-wise, women sewed Confederate flags, Confederate uniforms, and went as far as to sew underwear for soldiers. “The ladies were busy sewing flags, making uniforms and rolling bandages, while the men were drilling and shooting” (Mitchell 180). Women used their skills as socialites to raise money for the war effort in the form of dances, dinners, and benefit sales. Groups, such as the Ladies Gunboat Society, were also formed to help raise money for the cause (Faust 1209). To help with morale, the women skilled in music and writing wrote patriotic battle songs and poetry. Some songs were carried into battle by soldiers and recited to raise morale during long marches. Women abandoned their roles as stay-at-home matrons to work in Southern cities making cloth, textiles, and munitions. Others worked for the new government, in slave management, and continued work in agriculture (Faust 1200). Some women even went as far as cutting their hair, dressing up as men, and going off to war in disguise under false names (Faust 1209). The jobs that were left behind by the men were taken up by the women. Women, usually the wives of the men, took up professions such as dentistry, doctoring, administrators, mechanics and teachers.
The most popular occupation for women during the civil war was not an occupation, but was spending their time volunteering in military hospitals. Nursing was seen as very unladylike and unacceptable to most upper-class Southern women, like the Southern belles. But nursing and hospitals were very much in need and this forced a lot of women to again abandon their roles as ladylike beings in order to help the war effort (Faust 1215). The opinion of many during that time was that “Nurses were not truly women, but in some sense men in drag” (Faust 1216).
Nursing was cruel and harsh job. Only the strongest of women could handle such a position. During the civil war, many famous nurses reared their heads at the ugly face of war. Women like Clara Barton, Dorthea Dix, and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to obtain a medical degree and license from a university (Oates Woman 23). These three women were from the North, but they were the ones who started a trend that would spread all over the world and to the South (Oates Woman 1). Dorthea Dix created and headed an amateur army nursing corps with the help of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. Clara Barton joined up later in the war (Oates Woman 9). They had very little supplies and limited space. A common practice for these makeshift hospitals was to create beds out of tables and old sheets (Oates Woman 23).
Clara Barton was a nurse at one of these hospitals, but she was never satisfied by staying on the home front and helping the war when men on the battlefield were dying from injuries that could be easily treated. Clara, along with the help of some men and a few other women, created a medic unit to go to battle with troops (Oates Woman 59). On the battlefield, there were even less supplies and even more injured men. Several men were saved due to the medic unit because most men would die from losing too much blood and the medic unit could prevent this occurrence fairly easily. The worst thing that Clara mentions in her diary is the horror of amputation of limbs after battle:
“First his attendants placed him (solider) on the operating table and the surgeon put him to sleep with ether or chloroform. If both were lacking, the victim might get a shot of whiskey, or a slab of leather placed between his teeth to bite down on when he started screaming. Then, the surgeon would slice through flesh with a razor-sharp knife, saw through bone with a sharp-toothed saw, and snip off jagged ends of bone with pliers. Then he would place a clamp on the spewing arteries . . . And dress the bloody stump, leaving it to heal by granulation.” (Oates Woman 63)
The trend of a medical unit reached the South and pretty soon it was a permanent fixture to military forces. Clara Barton was like a real-life Scarlett O’Hara. However, Scarlett O’Hara was only a nurse for a short time before her family took precedence and she returned home to her plantation.
Women on the home front did many things to prepare for war. They were encouraged to trade their lives of luxury for simple lives of bare necessities. Songs encouraged women to “Fold away all your bright tinted dresses . . . No more delicate gloves, no more laces . . .” (Faust 1211). In 1861, women began to trade in their cakes and candies in order to save provisions for the war. But by 1862, meat and grain were becoming scarce. By early 1864, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was informed by a messenger that deaths had indeed occurred due to starvation over the past year (Faust 1211).
With the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which freed all slaved in the Confederacy, Southern planters had no labor at hand to harvest crops and no money to plant them. To make money to live and hire workers, women began renting out property (slave quarters usually), pawning their dresses, furniture, and keepsakes, and selling land or other property. At times, this still wasn’t enough to get through a harvest and women often found themselves and their families working the land themselves (Sorensen 27). Some women were entitled to the land which they fought so hard to keep. Married women could work own the land which was part of her marriage to her husband while he was away, but unmarried women were sometimes not entitled the land and were evicted from their plantations. Sometimes the Law of Coverture prevented women from having rights to land (Sorensen 27). Despite all this adversity, many women often found themselves becoming the single breadwinner of the family (Faust 1221).
Life on these abandoned plantations was dangerous. There were no men around to protect these women and there were many harmful things roaming the countryside. Freed slaves were a huge threat. The freed slaves were a huge threat to the safety of women. There was constantly the threat of murder, rape, and burglary from slaves wanting revenge from their time in bondage (Faust 1218). One confederate woman alone on a plantation wrote in her diary that “ . . . noises at night often make me fear the lives of my children and my own as well” (Faust 1219). Another huge threat was Yankee raids. Northern troops would travel the countryside and raid these huge plantations in order to free slaves, collect provisions, and gather money (Faust 1218).
The only protection a woman had from these threats were if she were lucky enough to have soldiers taking refuge in her home. Women on plantations were expected to use any extra space on the plantation to house and shield soldiers (Faust 1211). Soldiers taking refuge on plantations were usually wounded, discharged, or on leave for a while with no place to go. Some soldiers would be on the brink of death when coming to these plantations and many died while seeking refuge. It was the duty of women to honor the dead soldiers and give them a proper Christian burial (Faust 1214).
A last resort for single women to make money was to sell all of their goods and use the money to go to college and become teachers. Before in the South, teaching had been a man’s job. It was considered a foolish Northern trend for women to become school teachers (Faust 1215). Near the end of the war, women’s colleges all over the South, which were once barely scraping by, were thriving due to the increase of students. Where it had once been taboo for women to become educated, women were encouraged by the universities to go to college because the proffessors needed to make money (Faust 1216). Among these colleges was Trinity College in North Carolina, Wytheville Female College in Virginia, the Baptist Female College of Southwest Georgia, Hollins College, and Statesville North Carolina Female College (Faust 1217). Education became a exceedingly important for children during the end of the war years and school teachers were in high demand. Teachers made little money, but it was more than nothing (Sorensen 47).
Nearing the end of the war (starting in 1863), many women began to grow sick of the war. Emily Harris, a confederate mother wrote in her diary “The Confederacy. I almost hate the words” (Faust 1222). Many women were beginning to suffer from depression, trauma/anxiety disorder, and general disheartening feeling (Faust 1224). Women began to reject the Confederate propaganda about supporting the war from home. Petitions were written by several women asking for their sons and husbands to be released from duty in order to come home and help the family. One particular woman, Miranda Sutton, wrote a petition letter to Jefferson Davis asking him to send home her sons from war. She had sent off six sons and her husband. Her husband and two of her sons were already dead. Needless to say, her letter was ignored (Faust 1223). Because many of these letters were ignored, desperate women began writing letter to their men and asking them to desert (Faust 1224).
Rebellions started up in the end of 1863. Women rioted to receive or even steal provisions of bread, meat, cloth, and other substances. These rebellions broke out in Savannah, Georgia, Mobile, Alabama, High Point, North Carolina, Petersburg, Virginia, Milledgeville, Georgia, Columbus, Georgia, and in the capitol city of the Confederate South, Richmond, Virginia. These were acts of desperation and they continued until the end of the war ( Fause 1225). Rhett Butler, a character from the movie Gone with the Wind best explains that “Most of the miseries of the world are caused by war. And when the war is over, no one ever knows what they are all about” (Gone). It seems that the women forgot that they war was there to protect the nation they wanted so dearly and later ravaged. Be it on the battlefield or on the home front, the Confederacy surrendered on April 9, 1865.
Part 3
“All over! The war which had seemed so endless, the war which, unbidden and unwanted, had cut her life in two, had made so clean a cleavage that is was difficult to remember those other carefree days. She could look back, unmoved, at the pretty Scarlett with her fragile green morocco slippers and her flounces fragrant with lavender but she wondered if she could be that same Scarlett O’Hara with the County at her feet, a hundred slaves to do her bidding, the wealth of Tara like a wall behind her and doting parents anxious to grant any desire of her heart” (Mitchell 690). Scarlett wondered if the end of the war would bring prosperity back to the South. She hoped that things would go back to the way they were and she could once again flaunt her wealth and fashion all across the state. She could not have been more wrong. Reconstruction would prevent life from ever returning to ’normal’. There were no more slaves and the post-war South was so poverty ridden that it was still difficult to make ends meet and feed the family. Carpetbaggers from the North would come to the South to try and fix everything. Also, women became more vocal in their desire to be heard. War had a lasting impact on everyone.
War had an effect on Rebecca Schwart’s life, too. Her post-war life is completely and utterly shaped by the events of WWII. She became an orphan after her father killed her mother and himself to escape the American prejudice against Jews. She became a ward of the county and lived with a foster parent. When she was just shy of 16, she dropped out of school and started to work. She was married by 18 and had a son by 19 or 20. She left her husband 3 years later and was on the run for another 3 years. Then she remarried a rich man and gave her son the life she never had.
After the war, the South was trying to rebuild. Carpetbaggers were sent in order to help the reconstruction process. ‘Carpetbagger’ was a derogatory name Southerners gave anyone who came from the North in order to hold public office or manage a Southern district. These people often came south with all of their belongings packed up in huge carpet-style bags (Grantham 6). Carpetbaggers were given the duty of helping run political elections in the South, collect taxes, and liberate slaves. One promise of carpetbaggers was to give every slave family 40 acres and a mule to get started in their new life (Grantham 7). It infuriated Southerners to see a person with no Southern ties trying to run them.
During Reconstruction, women did all they could to help. Woman often did volunteer work, charity work, and social work. In trying to rebuild their lives, woman did types of work that were an extension to their roles as wives and mothers (Sorensen 10). However, women’s status during the war varied. There were a variety of legal, psychological and physical problems that women were dealing with. Women had to figure out how to survive with irreversible labels such as internally displaced person, widow, single breadwinner, victim of rape or torture, and ex-combatants (Sorensen 5). Rebecca dealt with post-war as an orphaned refugee/immigrant child.
Politically and legally, women were dealing with another mess of issues. Reconstruction women were worried about their rights in the new democracy (Sorensen 5). Politics never really interested Rebecca, even though she was an American citizen. Negotiations between the North and the South immediately after the Civil War were mainly male dominated. Women were underrepresented and minutely considered in any of the post-war talk (Sorensen 9). Some Southern men still believed that women were inferior and therefore could not understand enough to participate in politics, while others felt threatened by women’s participation in politics after seeing everything they had done during the war (Clinton 17). Either way women were denied participation in elections and voting. Another legal issue in which women dealt with was the act of filing for divorce. All marriages and divorces are recorded by the US census bureau. During the civil war years, the census was unable to accurately count the number of marriages until 1867 (Preston 3). In the counts of marriage and divorce taken during Reconstruction, it was recorded that there were higher rates of divorce compared to before the war. These divorce rates were mainly due to bad economy, high unemployment, and the inability to support the family (Preston 2). Also dealing with the topic of marriage, the Law of Coverture was questioned by women all in the area. This law caused trouble for women during the war and many believed that it should be done away with or reformed. This law was finally reformed to the point of invalidity in 1900 (Edwards 54). Women were beginning to speak out against laws that they believed were unfair to them. It was during Reconstruction that women abandoned being soft spoken and passive to speaking out and creating the unofficial start of the women’s rights movement. This start would eventually effect Rebecca’s life because she left her abusive husband. It is here proven that some historic events can affect the lives of others many years later.
Another effect of Reconstruction was urbanization. Towns and villages began to spring up more often and replace the vast countryside districts which the plantations had flourished on (Grantham 6). Small business districts started to develop in the South and women took up paying jobs. They worked in offices, mailrooms, copying services, as dressmakers, seamstresses, in stores, banks, and, in very serious cases, prostitution (Sorensen 34). It was necessary for women to do whatever necessary to survive in this new era fraud, corruption, and exorbitant taxes (Grantham 3).
Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877. The North believed that by this time, the South was well enough on it’s own to function without the threat of succession or rebellion. Carpetbaggers, that had not settled down, returned home and any Northern troops stationed in the South were called home (Grantham 1). Life returned to normal for the most part, but life for women would never be the same. Women had the beginnings of a voice, were working for pay, and had become more independent. What doesn’t kill one, makes one stronger. This is exactly what happened for women who survived the Civil War and Reconstruction.
“She had gone back to Tara once in fear and defeat and she had emerged from it’s sheltering walls strong and armed for victory. What she had done once, somehow - please God, she could do it again!” (Mitchell 1447). Scarlett picked up her life and headed back to her plantation home where she would start to rebuild her life. She was stronger than before and as tough as nails. Scarlett O’Hara’s story is one in which describes the life of many women during the Civil War. A southern belle turned strong warrior. A symbol to represent what women had become and what women would continue to be as they fought for their rights over the next 100 years. Scarlett, with the wind at her back, constantly thinking “ After all, tomorrow is another day!” (Gone).
Instead of picking up a life after war, Rebecca would create one. Being so young during wartime, the war affected her childhood and she started life with absolutely nothing. Making a life afterwards was her challenge. She went from rags, to working and marriage. That marriage was bad, and fake as it turns out, so she escaped from it with only a child to remind her of it. She would marry again, for real, and live a prosperous life. As Scarlett O’Hara went from a luxurious life to becoming a warrior, Rebecca Schwarts went from struggling her entire life to finally getting what she deserved and could never have from her family.
Works Cited
Clinton, Catherine. Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past. United States of America: Duke University Press, 1994.
Edwards, Laura F. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. United States of America: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2000.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Journal of American History. “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and Narratives of War”. Volume 76 No 4. pg 1200-1228. Organization of American Historians, 1990.
Gone with the Wind. Prod. David O. Selznick, Dir. Victor Fleming, Perf. Clark Gable and Vivien Lee. DVD. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.
Grantham, Dewey W. The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds. New York, New York: HarperCollins Inc, 1994.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York City, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Gravedigger’s Daughter. New York City, New York: HarperCollins Inc, 2007.
Oates, Stephen B. A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War. New York City, New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Preston, Samuel H. Demography. “The Incidence of Divorce with Cohorts of American Marriages Contracted since the Civil War”. Volume 16 No 4. pg 1-25. Population Associate on of America, Feb 1979.
Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern Belle in the American Novel. Gainesville, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1985.
Sorensen, Birgitte. Women and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Issues and Sources. Geneva: United Nations Research Institution for Social Development and Program for Strategic and International Security Studies, 1998.
