Whites, LeeAnn. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 256 pp. Megan Hatfield
aegis 2007 152
In her book Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South, LeeAnn Whites examines the role that gender played in the events of the South in the 19th century. Her thesis is quite simple: gender mattered. While this seems like a simple and obvious assertion, she is actually arguing against traditional scholarship in that area of study which has essentially held that gender was not important in the South because issues of race and class were privileged above one’s gender status. This rendered gender “invisible” on the level of the individual, and therefore, had no real or significant impact on that society. Whites points out that while that is in part true, scholars have defined gender too narrowly by restricting it to the ideological and individual level. Instead, she explains that gender needs to be understood as a relational matter between men and their dependent women; thus, tying gender to the larger workings of the social structure. With this definition, it is possible to examine the events of the 19th century South in a new light revealing that not only did gender matter in shaping those events, but it actually played a central role in them. Basically, she is saying that by not understanding the role that gender played in the social structure of the South, historians are not able to fully understand the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the making of the New South. The book is a compilation of essays written by Whites. She divides the book into two parts: the first part focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the second part focuses on the making of the New South. In the first four essays Whites argues that the Civil War “turned the household inside out, laid bare to public view and public significance the role of gender in the social order” (6). She shows that the Civil War was fought by the men in the South in order to preserve their standing in the social order as the heads of their households which rested on their ability to keep slaves and their women dependent. However, the war itself destabilized the structure of the household offering all of the dependents the opportunity and necessity to enter the public realm and to become socially visible. Typically, it seems like a wonderful opportunity—finally Southern women could achieve some independence, but in reality, Whites argues that that was far from what they wanted. Independence was at odds with traditional conceptions of femininity. Significantly, while women were taking charge on the home front, Southern men were experiencing a major crisis in gender as their role as the head of the household —their masculinity itself was deteriorating as the war was lost. By losing the war, the Southern white man lost his position in society since he was no longer the master of slaves, and less able to protect his wife. The final two essays in the first part specifically examine the role gender played in Reconstruction focusing on how the South attempted to “turn back the clock” by having gender return back in invisibility. Whites shows how the Southern white women simply wanted to reconstruct Southern white manhood and return to the time when women were protected by men and confined to the household. To do this, the Southern white women formed associations that were dedicated to memorializing the men who fought in the war.
