num_pages: 352
description: A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Francis Parkman PrizeWinner of the Avery Craven PrizeIn the ante-bellum South, women from elite slaveholding families were raised to consider themselves not so much as "women" but as "ladies," models of dependent femininity. But that ideal was to prove impossible to maintain during the social upheaval of the Civil War, when they found themselves suddenly assuming unaccustomed roles as workers, protectors, and providers. Through the use of hundreds of moving and eloquent letters, memoirs, and diary excerpts, Drew Gilpin Faust, one of the foremost historians of the American South, illuminates the lives of a wide array of Confederate from Lizzie Neblett, a housewife facing a life of physical labor for the first time, to Sallie Tompkins, a Virginia aristocrat turned military nurse, to Belle Boyd, a ruthless teenaged spy. An intensely personal work of scholarship, Mothers of Invention gives voice to the hitherto silent half of the Confederacy's ruling class and explains how its ethos continues to influence the lives of Southern women even today."A dramatically revealing study...[Faust looks] directly at the past, with a daughter's hard, steady gaze, and with a daughter's generous heart."--New York Times Book Review
language: English
title: Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
titlecomplete: Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
genres: Gender, War, Civil War, Nonfiction, Womens, American History, Womens Studies, Southern, American Civil War, History
ratings_count: 1140
series: Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies, The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies
awards: awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Francis Parkman Prize, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Jefferson Davis Award, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award
publisher: Vintage