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Images of Confederate Women in Southern Newspapers, 1861-65
The Civil War forced many southern women into the public sphere of war materiel production, factory labor, and hospital work, jobs that previously had been part of the male sphere. This article examines how Confederate newspaper editors framed such work for women and argues that the majority of southern editors not only recognized the necessity of women's moral, patriotic, and physical contributions to the war but frequently encouraged and applauded such actions. In an era of separate gender spheres, southern editors promoted women's war work as part of the existing southern and Confederate values of self-sufficiency, hard work, paternal devotion, and sacrifice for the new nation. Examining such press representations is important because Confederate editors played crucial roles in shaping public opinion during the war and in temporarily reconstructing gender roles during wartime.
Under the headline "Another Dangerous Woman," the Austin State Gazette told readers in October 1 862 the thrilling story of Susan Archer Talley, who was captured in Virginia in the previous April while trying to smuggle percussion caps to Confederate troops near Richmond. She hid the caps in a coffin and tried to pass through Union lines with the story that she was taking her brother's body home for burial, but suspicious Federal troops opened the coffin and found munitions rather than her dearly departed. She was arrested and sent to Fort McHenry in Baltimore for several months, where she was treated kindly, including being kept in a room rather than a cell, and allowed daily walks before being paroled to her Norfolk home.1
The Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, the Nashville Dispatch, and the American Citizen in Canton, Mississippi, reprinted the New York Heralds account of Talley's release. The writer for the Herald said of her: "She is deaf and dumb, but a quick and graceful writer, and seems to have enough faculties left to do us harm whenever she is able."2
Despite the inclusion of the prejudice of the time that a deaf mute was often mentally challenged, Talley's romantic adventure story, which read like dime-novel fiction, coupled with the New York Heralds comments on her danger, cheered southern readers.3 Here was a southern woman willing to sacrifice herself for greater national...