Women of the South During the Civil War
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War is a book about women in the South during the Civil War. The broader issue of this book is how women can empower themselves even in the face of hardship and - although the word is strong - the oppressions that society puts on them.
The preface to Faust's book contains a quote which Faust attributes to her mother:
I am sure that the origins of this book lie somewhere in that youthful experience, and in the continued confrontations with my mother, until the very eve of her death, when I was 19, about the requirements of what she usually called femininity. It's a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be.'"
Faust chooses to write the book from the perspective of the slave-owning women, the title The Mothers of Invention refers to the Confederate white women of slaveholding families. The book really tells the tale of their experiences during the civil war, and how they got through it and what they learned along the way.
As years passed with no end to
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