Booknotes: Love and Duty

New Arrival:
• Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss by Angela Esco Elder (UNC Press, 2022).

"Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers." Predictably, with the conflict's devastating toll (estimated at a quarter or more) on the Confederate population's cohort of military-age males, the dimensions of war widowhood were much broader in the Confederate South. In her book Love and Duty, historian Angela Esco Elder draws upon their "diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications...—as well as songs, literary works, and material objects like mourning gowns—to explore white Confederate widows' stories, examining the records of their courtships, marriages, loves, and losses to understand their complicated relationship with the Confederate state."

The sheer scale of Confederate widowhood conferred exceptional social, cultural, and political status that was expressed in a variety of ways both during and after the war. According to Elder, this societal influence earned through sacrifice transformed these war widows into significant political actors.

More from the description: "Confederate officialdom championed a particular image of white widowhood—the young wife who selflessly transferred her monogamous love from her dead husband to the deathless cause for which he'd fought. But a closer look reveals that these women spent their new cultural capital with great shrewdness and variety. Not only were they aware of the social status gained in widowhood; they also used that status on their own terms, turning mourning into a highly politicized act amid the battle to establish the Confederacy's legitimacy. Death forced all Confederate widows to reconstruct their lives, but only some would choose to play a role in reconstructing the nation."