Writing in Public and Private: Southern White Women’s Personal Narratives of the American Civil War Era

When the violence of the American Civil War swept through the physical as well as the psychological landscape of the Confederate states, numerous men and women tried to capture the onslaught of death, destruction, and loss onto paper. At the time, the searing experiences of war inspired words to tumble into diaries and journals, and decades later, into the genre of memoirs and autobiographies as well. By the early 1900s, southern white women actively joined their male counterparts as authors in order to recount their experiences on the home front. White women writers, such as Louise Wigfall Wright, Mary Polk Branch, Sara Rice Pryor, and Marion Harland, married memory, history, and storytelling in order to publicly reshape their accounts about a personal as well as local and national past. These narrative revealed how southern white women leveraged their role as 'women' to make certain kinds of ideological claims about identity -- further complicated by their participation in a capitalistic print culture. Each woman utilized the genre of autobiography to project their own socio-political visions about gender, race, class, and nationalism in a public recount of theirs (and others') lived experiences