Changes

In the years following the Civil War, Confederate women's efforts at preservation and memorialization led them to form memorial groups who worked to keep the memory of their local dead alive, through obtaining land for Confederate cemeteries, maintaining far-flung grave sites, and erecting public monuments.<ref> Caroline E. Janney, <i>Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause</i>, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 6.</ref> Among the earliest postwar female charitable organizations in the south, these groups were also some of the longest lasting. Often composed of upper-class women, these organizations were female-led though they occasionally included male members, who liaised with the community or completed those tasks considered unseemly for women. These groups, which spread across the south, gave Confederate women outlets for mourning and fueled the creation of the “New Southern Woman”. They paved the way for a variety of other women’s organizations through which elite women created roles for themselves in the community and outside their homes’ domestic spaces.<ref> Cynthia J. Mills, ed, <i>Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory</i>, (Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 2003), xv.</ref>

These women’s groups were part of a larger social movement which melded the Victorian ideal of the woman as the “Angel in the House” with a need to do something to cope with the large scale grief and death.<ref>Catherine W.Bishir,"A Strong Force of Ladies": Women, Politics, and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh." <i>The North Carolina Historical Review</i> 77, no. 4 (October 2000): 455-91.</ref> Groups of middle and upper-class women came together, seeking to memorialize the large numbers of dead in their families and communities as well as their lost cause of the Confederacy.<ref>Janney, <i>Burying the Dead</i>, 58</ref> These early efforts came in the same vein as the later romanticism of the plantation most famously seen in “Gone With the Wind” - a book and film which serves, for many individuals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as their main point of reference for what pre-war southern life was like, as well as the southern experience during the war.<ref>Anya Jabour, <i>Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South</i>, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 281.</ref> Like Margaret Mitchell’s later fiction, these public memorials were designed to maintain the social and cultural hierarchy of the old south, in this case by placing visual reminders of white male Confederate veterans and the Confederacy in public places and at high vantage points.<ref>Mills, <i>Monuments</i>, 141.</ref> These actions epitomize the postwar political climate during which Confederate Veterans and their children dominated the positions of power in local governments and communities, but while those politicians were men in male roles, the monuments represent a trend in women’s work outside the home and their incursion within the traditionally masculine realm of politics.<ref>Mills, <i>Monuments</i>, 16.</ref>