• Faust examines the voices of over 500 Confederate slaveholding women to develop her thesis.

"As years passed with no end to war in sight, emotional and material deprivation took their inescapable psychological toll. A rising sense of personal desperation, an eroding confidence in those on whom they had relied for protection, and an emerging doubt about their own ability to endure prompted women to reconsider the most fundamental assumptions about their world...But faced with unrelenting hardships of war and the escalating difficulty of simple self-preservation, they had begun inevitably to think about themselves" (234).

"Women...displayed their new self-absorption and self-interest in a growing reluctance to continue to yield their loved ones to the Confederate army. At the outset of the war, women had urged husbands and brothers into service, but by the later years of conflict quite a different attitude became evident. Even at the expiration of men’s first terms of enlistment, as early as 1862 or 1863, many wives insisted that their husbands had already given enough to the Cause. As Mary Bell of North Carolina bluntly proclaimed to Alfred in July 1862, ‘I think you have done your share in this war’ (240 -1)...Mary Chichester expressed a similar desire. ‘I hope,’ she confessed, ‘when you do get exchanged, you will think, the time past has sufficed for public service, & that your own family require yr protection & help – as others are deciding.’ Gertrude Thomas saw the conflict of loyalties and its resolution clearly. ‘Am I willing to give my husband to gain Atlanta for the Confederacy? No, No, No, a thousand times No!’" (242)

"By the last months of the war many women, especially those of the middling and lower orders, were not just holding husbands and brothers back from service but were actively urging them to desert. The risk of execution and the shame of flight now seemed acceptable in the face of almost certain and almost certainly useless injury or death at the front. Confederate leaders recognized the power that women exerted in persuading soldiers to abandon their posts. One military officer even went so far as to urge the secretary of war to begin to censor the mails, for, he insisted, ‘the source of all the present evils of Toryism & desertion in our country is letter writing to...the army.’...At every level of the social order women were making their particular contributions to Confederate military failure" (243).

"As hardships mounted, escape seemed all the more desirable... Pre-eminent [hostess] was Mrs. Robert Stannard, who was reputed to have spent more that $30,000 on entertainment during a winter that saw Confederate troops camped in nearby counties suffering for bare subsistence...Poorer women were more likely to express their dissent from the ideology of sacrifice and the reality of deprivation in the bread riots that swept across the South in the late years of the war. In Savannah, Mobile, High Point, Petersburg, Milledgeville, Columbia, and even in the capital city of Richmond itself, crowds of desperate females jointed together to claim provision they believed their due, and in more rural locations bands of female marauders swept into plantation areas to seize food crops ready for harvest in the fields. These seemingly unrelated phenomena – upper-class women’s frivolity and lower-class women’s violence- both represented responses to the Confederacy’s violation of white women’s expectations within the South’s paternalistic social order" (244-5).

• Her thesis argues against the traditional interpretation that extolled women for their sacrifices during the war. Instead, she asserts that as the war progressed and hardship and abandonment by their husbands continued, southern women abandoned the war effort and "undermined both objective and ideological foundation for the Confederate effort. They directly subverted the south’s military and economic effectiveness as well as civilian morale" (198).

"The earliest discussions of the Confederate woman in newspapers and periodicals sought to engage her in the war effort by stressing the relevance of her accustomed spiritual role... ‘Can you imagine,’ asked the magazine Southern Field and Fireside, ‘what would be the moral condition of the Confederate army in six months’ without women’s influence? What but a woman ‘makes the Confederate soldier a gentleman of honor, courage, virtue, and truth, instead of a cut-throat and a vagabond?’...As recruits drilled and bivouacked, women found outlet for their energies sewing countless flags, uniforms, and even underwear for departing units; penning patriotic songs and verse; submitting dozens of designs for the national flag..." (174-5).

"And as the conflict wore on and desertions and disaffection increased, the connection became clearer. Women must do more than sent their men to battle. When men deserted, women were to demonstrate that devotion to the Cause had primacy over personal commitments to husbands or sons....The growing scale of the conflict [meant that women were]... implored them [women] to make essential and increasing sacrifices for the Cause. As the Reverend R.W. Barnwell emphasized in an address to the Ladies Clothing Association of Charleston, ‘WITHOUT YOU, THIS WAR COULD NOT HAVE BEEN CARRIED ON, FOR THE GOVERNMENT WAS NOT PREPARED TO MEET THAT THAT WAS THROWN UPON IT’" (180-1).

"White southern women...expected that their sacrifices would be recompensed...[with] care and protection...By the later years of the war, however, the ability of southern men to meet requirements of care and protection, to ensure the physical safety – and even the subsistence – of the civilian population had broken down. In response, many women began to demonstrate the conditional nature of their patriotism; there were clear limits to their willingness to sacrifice. Concerns about personal loss and personal survival- both physical and psychological – had eroded commitment to the Cause...Margaret Junkin Preston greeted the news of the death of her stepson and several of his friends by protesting, ‘Who thinks or cares for victory now!’...As early as 1862, Julia Le Grand had come to feel that ‘nothing is worth such sacrifice.’...Women were increasingly alienated from the new nation and resentful of its demands of them" (191-2).

"...[These women] threatened Davis and his government by...warn[ing] that God would punish the Confederacy because it had not lived up to its own ideals – particularly its obligations to the women and children...By 1863, at least some Confederate women had become more aggressive in their expressions of discontent...Destitute female petitioners warned Confederate officials that they would urge their husbands and sons to desert if their basic needs for family subsistence were not met...As the desertion rate rose steadily in the southern army throughout 1864, Confederate officials...explained, ‘Desertion takes place because desertion is encouraged...And though the ladies may not be willing to concede the fact, they are nevertheless responsible...for the desertion in the army and the dissipation in the country’" (194-5).

...The immediate and tangible needs of the living had become more pressing...those needs yielded a sense of grievance that by 1863 became sufficiently compelling and widespread to erupt into bread riots in communities across the South...The traditional narrative of war had come to seem meaningless to many women; the Confederacy offered them no acceptable terms in which to cast their experience" (196-7).

"...Historians have wondered in recent years why the Confederacy did not endure longer. In considerable measure, I would suggest, it was because so many women did not want it to. The way in which their interests in the war were publicly defined – in a very real sense denied - gave women little reason to sustain the commitment modern war required. It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War" (199).