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Were American Women Ultimately gainers or loser in Conflict
From the start of the war, the south began an exploration of gender as it found itself investing a lot of responsibilities into the female community and relying on them to fight for the survival of their families and their nation. As the Montgomery Daily Advertiser printed, “the surface of society, like a great ocean, is up heaved and all the relations of life are disturbed and out of joint”. The traditional gender roles were being challenged. Many southern women realised their identity was based on the presumed fact that slaves would always be there to perform the menial tasks around the house and that men would be there to provide protection and support. However, the war took these away from them and they found they had to try and rely on themselves to not only support themselves but also the men away fighting. The civil war gave American women new opportunities that they would not normally have had. At the end of the war, many women found that they lost their jobs to the returning soldiers and many felt unappreciated and that their efforts during the war had gone un-noticed. However the war gave them a taste of what the world had to offer. They had been pushed towards new understandings of themselves and they now wanted to invent new foundations for self-definition and self worth as the props of whiteness and wealth were beginning to disappear. I believe therefore that woman were ultimately gainers in the conflict. Although the experiences of northern and southern women were different and the opportunities that they had were often only temporary, women had proven that they were capable of looking after themselves because they had responded so well to the hardships they encountered. The seed for future change had been sown and especially in the south, they began to reconstruct the meanings of southern womanhood that would last long after the end of the civil war.