History 246 Reading Guide
Discussion: Southern Women
- Jean Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (1985).
Further reading:
- Nancy F. Cott, ed., “A Confederate Lady’s Diary by Mary Boykin Chesnut” (1861-2), Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (1986), 209-216. (e-reserve)
- Nancy F. Cott, et al., eds., “Louisa McCord on Enfranchisement of Women” (1852), “Gertrude Clanton Thomas’s Civil War Diary” (1864-5), Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women 2nd ed. (1996), 262-267, 274-280. (e-reserve)
Questions:
- While Friedman explores many of the same issues that we have addressed for New England and mid-Atlantic women, the configuration of southern women’s lives and the implications of that configuration are quite different. How do race, class, and the “evangelical community” affect the lives and identities of southern women?
- How does her examination compare and contrast, in structure and presentation or style, with Ulrich’s and Jensen’s studies? What problem(s) does she address? Why does she use the image of the “enclosed garden”?
- In the chronological evolution that we have been exploring, her account overlaps with the last two decades of Jensen’s account, and then continues through the 1890s. The Civil War provides an important marker in the South; for women, what changed—and what stayed the same—after the Civil War? Are those changes and consistencies section-specific (the south, vs. the north, the mid-Atlantic, the midwest)?
- Which case study most intrigued you?
