ABSTRACT

During the first decade after the Civil War, black and white women strove to take up their lives again in a South transformed by war and Emancipation. Many white women had assumed their troubles would end when the men came home from the war. But by 1865 one out of every four Confederate soldiers was dead, transportation networks were wrecked, southern cotton no longer dominated the world market, and thousands of farms and plantations had been left with no seed, no machinery, and no livestock. Moreover, the federal program of Reconstruction put the entire South under the military control of the victorious northern Republicans in Congress. Besides the army, there was the federal Freedmen's Bureau, which opened offices and schools for the ex-slaves throughout the South—just one more proof that the old world was gone forever. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203949610/869015b0-77e4-47fa-bc94-91dbdd774f8f/content/fig52_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>