Sc biting the bullet download3/22/2023 ![]() ![]() The American Civil War marks a historical and cultural moment when disability was made central to the construction of national identity and interpersonal subjectivity. It was the “Disability Pension Act” (1890), passed as aging veterans’ disabilities continued to increase, that introduced “disability” as a key term into “the official federal legal lexicon.” And yet our current use of the term has almost completely severed it from the Civil War context, which this essay seeks to recover. The Civil War constructed the concept of “disability” where previously terms such as “freak” or “cripple” had prevailed. Particular provisions in the draft-namely, the ability to pay a commutation fee or hire a substitute to serve in one’s stead-also created new forms of sociality, as did the relationships of care into which disabled Americans entered with each other. Disability became a precondition for remaining a civilian, as well as the outcome of having served in action. Instated on both sides of the conflict in 1863, the draft used disability as a key measure in assessing the fitness of individual draftees to serve in the armed forces. That condition was not just produced by battlefield injuries it was also produced by the institution of the first federal military draft. The Civil War scaled up disability to a prevailing social condition. But we need to rethink such assessments in relation to the massive injuries, and especially the loss of limbs, brought about by the American Civil War. We are used to thinking about disability as an exceptional bodily condition, and much scholarship treats it as such. © 2008 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Confederate Daughters identifies the experiences of these teenage daughters as making a significant contribution to the new woman in the New South. Augmented by eighteen illustrations, this book offers a generational understanding of the transitional nature of wartime and its effects on women's self-perceptions. This transformative female identity was an important aspect of the Lost Cause mythology-the version of the conflict that focused on Southern nationalism-and bridged the cultural gap between the antebellum and postbellum periods. Drawing on their personal and published recollections of the war, slavery, and the Old South, Ott argues that young women created a unique female identity different from that of older Southern women, the Confederate bellehood. Confederate Daughters also reveals how these young women, in an effort to sustain their families throughout the war, adjusted to new domestic duties, confronting the loss of slaves and other financial hardships by seeking paid work outside their homes. Their political engagement is evident from their knowledge of military battles, and was expressed through their clothing, social activities, relationships with peers, and interactions with Union soldiers. From a position of young womanhood and privilege, they threw their support behind the movement to create a Confederate identity, which was in turn shaped by their participation in the secession movement and the war effort. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders. Social norms for daughters of the elite, their preparation for their roles as Southern women, and their material and emotional connections to the slaveholding class changed drastically during the Civil War. Ott discusses how the loyalty of young Southern women to the fledgling nation, born out of a conservative movement to preserve the status quo, brought them into new areas of work, new types of civic activism, and new rituals of courtship during the Civil War. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |