Gender and History of the Postbellum U.S. South

Although gender as a category of analysis has been largely accepted in the discipline of history for its valuable insights, such acceptance was not without resistance. The difficulty of understanding how gender applies in all historical situations impeded early endorsement. In this article, I examine works of historians writing on the postbellum U.S. South, a time and place when all social and political relations were especially volatile and in flux. The chosen works reveal the ways gender has collapsed the divide between public and private, between social and political history, divisions that have defied resolution. They also provided a foundation for studies on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, which followed.