Publication Year
2017
Keywords
civil war, lost cause, southern, women, reconstruction, print culture
Disciplines
African American Studies | Cultural History | United States History | Women's History
Abstract
This thesis explores the role of southern women before, during, and after the Civil War in shaping the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. White women, as professional writers or amateur historians, actively supported the Lost Cause through their writings and their membership in organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. These women were drawn to the Lost Cause as a means of reasserting racial and gender norms of the prewar South, and were instrumental in forming the Lost Cause as the dominant memory of the Civil War. In contrast, black southern women also turned to writing as a form of witness and protest against the whitewashing of slavery and the Confederacy that were crucial to the Lost Cause.
Department 1 Awarding Honors Status
History
Recommended Citation
Robles, A. (2017). "Unswerving Devotion to Truth and Duty": Southern Women and the Print Culture of the Lost Cause, 1850-1920 (Undergraduate honors thesis, University of Redlands). Retrieved from https://inspire.redlands.edu/cas_honors/156
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, United States History Commons, Women's History Commons
