Title: Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
Author: Laura F. Edwards
Year of Publication: 1997
Thesis:
Especially gender, but also race and class, form the most important tools of analysis for examining Reconstruction. Elite white people, "common" white people, and Black people used the legal means at their disposal to gain civil and social rights during Reconstruction through the institution of marriage even as it was designed to keep especially; however, by adopting elite attitudes about male dominance over the household, they reinforced white male control over the social and political landscape. As former slaveowners and elite white people saw their identities constructed around the ownership of enslaved people collapse, they reconstituted their identities within the home, with elite white men dominating the public sphere, and elite white women the home. Edwards locates some areas of potential crossover, where low SES white folk and African Americans might have engaged in parallel pursuits, but she argues that Southern Democrats were able to quickly stoke white fears of Black-led sexual violence against white women to systematically terrorize and disfranchise black folk. The early embrace of the patriarchal family model, she argues, ultimately backfired.
Time: 1865-1887
Geography: Granville County, NC
Organization:
- Preface
- "gender, in combination with race and class, shaped the political terrain not just in Granville County but across the South during Reconstruction." (xi)
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Disappearance of Henderson Cooper and Susan Daniel: Redrawing the political Terrain of the Postemancipation South
1. You Can't Go Home Again: Marriage and Households
2. "How can They Do It on Three Barrels of Corn a Year?": Labor
3. "Rich Men" and "Cheerful Wives": Gender Roles in Elite White Households
4. "I am My Own Woman and Will Do as I Please": Gender Roles in Poor African-American and Common White Households
5. "Privilege" and "Protection": Civil and Political Rights
6. The "Best Men": Party Politics and the Collapse of the Knights of Labor
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Political / Social history
Methods:
Sources:
Court documents
Historiography:
This appears to counter Foner's optimism somewhat.
Keywords:
Public Sphere - As I'm reading it, the public sphere is essentially the ideology of the sphere of white male supremacy; the private sphere is everything submitted under that force - both of these function more as concept than truth.
Themes:
Marriage (based on custom vs. contract)
Labor
Public/private spheres
Domestic virtue
Apprenticeship
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Notes:
- Marriage means something different to elite whites vs. Black people, who saw it as civil rights + citizenship.
- Paradoxes: control over free Black families vs. certain freedoms extended via
- General groups in play: Elite whites, Black people as a whole, and poor/common whites.