| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War. By Victoria E. Ott. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. xvi, 215 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8093-2828-4.)

Victoria E. Ott's slim volume adds a welcome focused analysis to the discussion of the role of white Southern women in the Confederate cause and in its memorialization. This book builds on recent works on Confederate nationalism and studies of Confederate women that have acknowledged the importance of age as well as gender. Writing in roughly chronological thematic chapters often based on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Ott chooses to focus on young women "born between 1843 and 1849 ... [who were] members of slaveholding, secessionist families" (p. 4). The way Ott deploys "adolescence" as a central analytical concept is a useful contribution to Civil War–era scholarship, though it challenges those scholars who have argued that the notion of such a separate stage of human development did not exist at the time. Drawing on work done about American youth at other times, Ott also uses "generation" to describe women born in a fairly short time span (1843–1849) and connected by their economic and social status, stage in life, and war experiences in ways that affected their outlook for the rest of their lives.

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