"Examining the relationship between middle- and planter-class white women who supported the Confederacy, this book demonstrates that elite and middle-class white Southern women--active at home and abroad--played an integral role in the construction of Confederate nationalism as both actors and symbols, and it traces the impact of and the memories surrounding these women's wartime activism into the twentieth century"--

In The War the Women Lived, Walter Sullivan presents an informal history of the American Civil War in the South as seen through the eyes of the 23 principals whose acutely perceptive reports he has chosen for this book. "Through their memorable voices," George Garrett has written, comes "a vivid and fascinating view ... of those terrible times." The editor has selected 31 narrative sequences that unfold in chronological order. Each selection constitutes...