Gendered Strife & Confusion

Book excerpt: Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links post-Civil War transformations in private and public life. She illustrates how ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners - elite and poor, white and black, Democrat and Republican - envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.