Gendered Strife & Confusion

Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links post-Civil War transformations in private and public life. She illustrates how ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners - elite and poor, white and black, Democrat and Republican - envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.

Laura F. Edwards is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida.