"Public Women' and
the Confederacy."
Catherine Clinton
The Civil War caused Americans
in both the North and the South to re-examine a number assumptions
and beliefs, including the place of women in their respective
socities. Clinton explores the ways that southern women's more
public roles--as breadwinners and as supporters of the Confederate
war effort became entangled in the controversy over the presence
of large numbers of prostitutes in the Confederate capital of
Richmond. These "public women," victimized by the economic hardships
caused by the war, seemed to some observors to indicate the direction
"virtuous" women would go if allowed to retain their more prominent
roles in southern society after the war.
Catherine Clinton has cut a very wide swath through the fields
of southern and Civil War history since receiving her PhD from
Princeton University. She has written or edited more than a dozen
books-with two slated for publication next year-that have been
well-received by scholars and general readers alike. She has consulted
for The History Channel, the documentaries "Africans in America"
and "Civil War Journal," and the children's television game show
"Where in Time is Carmen San Diego?" A popular speaker, she has
delivered lectures at University College in London, the Atlanta
History Center, the University of Virginia, and the University
of Genoa in Italy. Finally, she has served on numerous book prize
committees, on the Executive Council of the Southern Historical
Association, and as president of the Southern Association of Women
Historians.
No one has been more prolific in exploring the lives of southern
women of the nineteenth century, which she has done in books like
The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South, Tara
Revisited: Women, War and the Plantation Legend, and The Other
Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. In addition,
she has encouraged other historians to examine alternative views
of the south and of the Civil War by editing numerous collections
of essays, including Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War,
Half-Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past,
and The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South.
