A Requiem to Departed Days: The Transformation and Retrenchment of Planter-Class Women in Georgia
Graduation Date
Spring 2009
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program Name
Humanities
First Reader
Patricia Dougherty, OP, PhD
Second Reader
Martin Anderson, JD, PhD
Abstract
During the American Civil War, elite Southern women were required to step outside their traditional role as the protected gender in order to take on responsibilities like supporting Confederate troops, maintaining and operating plantations, supervising slaves, and providing for their families. For planter-class women, advances in personal autonomy were not discarded after the war, however, the more public nature of their postwar activities was conducted within the confines of a traditional gender construct, constrained by overarching issues of race and class. The diaries and journals left by four Georgia women, Eliza Frances Andrews, Mary Sharpe Jones, Frances Butler Leigh, and Ella Gertrude Thomas, all women whose families had an enormous stake in the plantation culture of the antebellum South, reveal the life-altering changes experienced by them as they struggled to maintain class distinction in the face of Confederate defeat and the destruction of the plantation system.