Women

The Civil War Diary Quilt: 121 Stories and The Quilt Blocks They Inspired

The Civil War era was a time of great tragedy and triumph, and for a diverse group of women it was a distinctive thread in their lives and their quilting. Quilters and historians alike will appreciate the timeless lessons shared through actual diary entries and 121 related quilt blocks featured in The Civil War Diary Quilt, from Rosemary Youngs, author of the innovative book, The Amish Circle Quilt.

This reference incorporates instructions, list of supplies, a photo gallery, and 121 quilt blocks inspired by actual diary entries from 10 women living during the Civil War. Readers meet a variety of women including Mary Austin Wallace through her stories about running a 160-acre farm in Michigan, while her husband is away at war; 17-year-old Emma Florence LeConte as she recounts the day the Union army set a path of destruction through Columbia, SC; and Rachel Young King Anderson who moved away from Tennessee with her husband and children to start a new life. In addition to the 121 blocks that make a full quilt, this must-have reference includes smaller projects that use the same blocks.

-Actual diary entries of 10 women living during the Civil War create a unique historical reference

-Includes 121 full-size quilt block patterns that can also be used to make smaller additional projects

Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

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. Faust chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War

“Albert Cashier” served three years in the Union Army and passed successfully as a man until 1911 when the aging veteran was revealed to be a woman named Jennie Hodgers. Frances Clayton kept fighting even after her husband was gunned down in front of her at the Battle of Murfreesboro. And more than one soldier astonished “his” comrades-in-arms by giving birth in camp.

This lively and authoritative book opens a hitherto neglected chapter of Civil War history, telling the stories of hundreds of women who adopted male disguise and fought as soldiers. It explores their reasons for enlisting; their experiences in combat, and the way they were seen by their fellow soldiers and the American public. Impeccably researched and narrated with verve and wit, They Fought Like Demons is a major addition to our understanding of the Civil War era.

Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave

A vibrant social history set against the backdrop of the Antebellum south and the Civil War that recreates the lives and friendship of two exceptional women: First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her mulatto dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly.

“I consider you my best living friend,” Mary Lincoln wrote to Elizabeth Keckly in 1867, and indeed theirs was a close, if tumultuous, relationship. Born into slavery, mulatto Elizabeth Keckly was Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker, confidante, and mainstay during the difficult years that the Lincolns occupied the White House and the early years of Mary’s widowhood. But she was a fascinating woman in her own right, independent and already well-established as the dressmaker to the Washington elite when she was first hired by Mary Lincoln upon her arrival in the nation’s capital. Lizzy had bought her freedom in 1855 and come to Washington determined to make a life for herself as a free black, and she soon had Washington correspondents reporting that “stately carriages stand before her door, whose haughty owners sit before Lizzy docile as lambs while she tells them what to wear.” Mary Lincoln had hired Lizzy in part because she was considered a “high society” seamstress and Mary, an outsider in Washington’s social circles, was desperate for social cachet. With her husband struggling to keep the nation together, Mary turned increasingly to her seamstress for companionship, support, and advice—and over the course of those trying years, Lizzy Keckly became her confidante and closest friend.

With Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, pioneering historian Jennifer Fleischner allows us to glimpse the intimate dynamics of this unusual friendship for the first time, and traces the pivotal events that enabled these two women—one born to be a mistress, the other to be a slave—to forge such an unlikely bond at a time when relations between blacks and whites were tearing the nation apart. Beginning with their respective childhoods in the slaveholding states of Virginia and Kentucky, their story takes us through the years of tragic Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the early Reconstruction period. An author in her own right, Keckly wrote one of the most detailed biographies of Mary Lincoln ever published, and though it led to a bitter feud between the friends, it is one of the many rich resources that have enhanced Fleischner’s trove of original findings.

A remarkable, riveting work of scholarship that reveals the legacy of slavery and sheds new light on the Lincoln White House, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly brings to life a mesmerizing, intimate aspect of Civil War history, and underscores the inseparability of black and white in our nation’s heritage.


From the Hardcover edition.

A Woman's Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862

Cornelia Peake McDonald's story of the Civil War records a personal and distinctly female battle: a southern woman's lonely struggle in the midst of chaos to provide safety and shelter for herself and her nine children as their home is destroyed by the forces of war. Whether describing a Union soldier's theft of her Christmas cakes, the discovery of a human foot in her garden, or the death of her daughter, her story of the Civil War at home is compelling and disturbing. Her tremendous determination and unyielding spirit is a testimony to a woman's will to preserve her family.

Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 (Library of Southern Civilization)

Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War

No American needs to be told that the Civil War brought the United States to a critical juncture in its history. The war changed forever the face of the nation, the nature of American politics, the status of African-Americans, and the daily lives of millions of people. Yet few of us understand how the war transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among American citizens. Divided Houses is the first book to address this sorely neglected topic, showing how the themes of gender, class, race, and sexuality interacted to forge the beginnings of a new society.
In this unique volume, historians Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber bring together a wide spectrum of critical viewpoints--all written by eminent scholars--to show how gender became a prism through which the political tensions of antebellum America were filtered and focused. For example, Divided Houses demonstrates that the abolitionist movement was strongly allied with nineteenth-century feminism, and shows how the ensuing debates over sectionalism and, eventually, secession, were often couched in terms of gender. Northerners and Southerners alike frequently ridiculed each other as "effeminate": slaveowners were characterized by Yankees as idle and useless aristocrats, enfeebled by their "peculiar institution"; northerners were belittled as money-grubbers who lacked the masculine courage of their southern counterparts.
Through the course of the book, many fascinating subjects are explored, such as the new "manly" responsibilities both black and white men had thrust upon them as soldiers; the effect of the war on Southern women's daily actions on the homefront; the essential part Northern women played as nurses and spies; the war's impact on marriage and divorce; women's roles in the guerilla fighting; even the wartime dialogue on interracial sex. There is also a rare look at how gender affected the experience of freedom for African-American children, a discussion of how Harriet Beecher Stowe attempted to distract both her readers and herself from the ravages of war through the writing of romantic fiction, and a consideration of the changing relations between black men and a white society which, during the war, at last forced to confront their manhood. In addition, an incisive introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson helps place these various subjects in an overall historical context.
Nowhere else are such topics considered in a single, accessible volume. Divided Houses sheds new light on the entire Civil War experience--from its causes to its legacy--and shows how gender shaped both the actions and attitudes of those who participated in this watershed event in the history of America.

Mary's World: Love, War, and Family Ties in Nineteenth-century Charleston

Born to affluence and opportunity in the South's Golden Age, Mary Motte Alston Pringle (1803-1884) represented the epitome of Southern white womanhood. Her husband was a wealthy rice planter who owned four plantations and 337 slaves. Her thirteen children included two Harvard scholars, seven world travelers, a U.S. Navy war hero, six Confederate soldiers, one possible Union collaborator, a Confederate firebrand trapped in the North, an expatriate bon vivant in France, and two California pioneers. Mary's World illuminates in lavish detail the world and psyche of this wealthy, well-educated, well-intentioned woman and her family from the antebellum South.

During the Civil War, Mary and her husband, William, stood helpless as two sons were killed, another was driven insane, their slaves were freed, and the world as they knew it was swept away by a hurricane of social change. In her own words, Mary tells us about the joys, sorrows, frustrations, and terrors she and her family faced in nineteenth-century Charleston. This intimate, visceral biography was drawn directly from over 2,500 pages of Mary's handwritten letters, journals and diaries, none of which, she could have imagined, would ever be read by strangers. Therein lies their power.

Readers also learn about the vastly different lifestyles, food, clothing, and experiences of their slaves. Mary's World also pays special attention to Cretia Stewart, Mary's favorite servant, Cretia's husband, Scipio, and their free descendants, some of whom worked for Mary's grandchildren well into the twentieth century. How Mary, William, their children, and slaves lived before the Civil War, clung desperately to life in the eye of the maelstrom, and coped - or failed to cope -- with its bewildering aftermath is the story of this book. The letters and images they left behind offer priceless insights into the anguished roots of Southern social history.

Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (Penguin Classics)

Originally published in 1868—when it was attacked as an “indecent book” authored by a “traitorous eavesdropper”—Behind the Scenes is the story of Elizabeth Keckley, who began her life as a slave and became a privileged witness to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Keckley bought her freedom at the age of thirty-seven and set up a successful dressmaking business in Washington, D.C. She became modiste to Mary Todd Lincoln and in time her friend and confidante, a relationship that continued after Lincoln’s assassination. In documenting that friendship—often using the First Lady’s own letters—Behind the Scenes fuses the slave narrative with the political memoir. It remains extraordinary for its poignancy, candor, and historical perspective.