Booknotes: Sisterhood of the Lost Cause

New Arrival:

• Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South by Jennifer Lynn Gross (LSU Press, 2025).

With over a quarter of all Confederate combatants losing their lives during the Civil War, postwar southern society was left with a lot of widows. Even so, according to historian Jennifer Lynn Gross, this "mass widowhood" has been "studied very little by scholars" (pg. 12). Gross's Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South "helps rectify that historical omission by supplying a sweeping analysis of women whose husbands perished in the war."

The two chapters of Part I center on exploring the "myriad of experiences of Confederate widowhood for the widows themselves, with the primary focus on women who lost their husbands during the war or shortly thereafter because of it." This "includes a focus on how widows grieved and dealt with the emotional pain caused by their loss." The "practical realities" of these women's unexpected and undesired new role in traditional southern society, including the many financial challenges involved with it, are also discussed (pg. 11).

Part II, in three chapters, "shifts attention outward to how other southerners perceived Confederate widows and their plight." According to Gross, white southern society enshrined these women as angels of the Lost Cause "rhetorically through poetry, literature, and memorial activities; and practically through the benevolence of postwar Confederate associations and the distribution of pensions." Their sheer numbers as well as their practical and symbolic significance meant that these widows would play a key role in reconstructing southern society, and closely studying them "necessarily reconfigures how historians have understood the postbellum period" (pp. 11-12).