Citation: Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).

Thesis: The upheaval of the Civil War affected three generations of women in the south in discrete ways. Women born before 1820 embraced few changes in status, while women born between 1820 and 1849, and women born 1850 and after, increasingly took advantage of the disruption in scoial order to stake out more independent positions in the public sphere.  

Theoretical Framework: Age and pre-Civil War experience mediated how aggressively women pursued changes in status in the postwar south.

Methodology: The study is based on a handfull of VA and NC counties which Censer uses to generalize about the experience of women throughout the middle south. She also focuses entirely on elite, well-educated (white) women, because, as Censer argues, these women had the opportunity to reconstruct southern ideals of womanhood in the aftermath of the war.

Sources: Personal papers, published and unpublished literature, newspapers, county record, census records, diaries, etc. 

What Engine Drives the Book: Discrepencies in historical evidence call for a new theory that can reconcile conflicting conclusions regarding how the status of women changed (or did not change) in the post-Civil War south.

Place in Historiography: Censer suggests that the period immediately following the Civil War is the least studied era in the history of southern women. She also notes a debate among historians regarding the nature and magnitude of change in the position of women following the Civil War. She notes Anne Scott's classic thesis that the war helped liberate southern women, and a series of works disputing this theory. Censer agrees mostly with Scott, but tries to reconcile the dissenting evidence by showing differences in how each generation of women reacted to, and were affected by the war.

Key Points:

Strengths: Censer's age analysis offers a very convincing arguement about why historians have found vastly different evidence about the magnitude of change in the status of southern women.

Weaknesses: The exclusive focus on elite women allows Censer to draw specific conclusions about this group, but ignoring the wider range of women's experiences makes it hard to prove any generalizations (or even contrasts) about womanhood in the south.