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Women of the Confederacy WTF


debrand

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from what I have read, many women found slavery burdensome...it was the plantation or small farmers owners wives job to house, feed, clothe, tend sick people they felt were 'ungrateful' and hard to manage ..and they often considered themselves the real slaves :| .

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from what I have read, many women found slavery burdensome...it was the plantation or small farmers owners wives job to house, feed, clothe, tend sick people they felt were 'ungrateful' and hard to manage ..and they often considered themselves the real slaves :| .

I just can't get over how unpleasant and confusing I find this. On the one hand, women were being oppressed by a patriarchal society and they did have to work hard. On the other hand, the general sentiment of "keeping slaves is such hard work that I'm the real slave here!" :violin: is so disgusting that I want to puke.

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from what I have read, many women found slavery burdensome...it was the plantation or small farmers owners wives job to house, feed, clothe, tend sick people they felt were 'ungrateful' and hard to manage ..and they often considered themselves the real slaves :| .

Some women from the slaveholding class also had to deal with the fact that their husbands were sexually assaulting female slaves, a fact hard to overlook when slave women gave birth to mixed race babies with similar physical traits to the masters. The nature of antebellum southern society, which was extremely patriarchal, meant that men could engage in such behavior with impunity. Their wives responded in many instances by lashing out at the slaves who being violated by their husbands.

All in all, I don't have a lot of love for the social structure of the antebellum South.

And just as a side note, an excellent book on slaveholding women's experiences during the war is Drew Gilpin Faust's Mother's of Invention. Bruce Levine also came out recently with a more general look at southern society and how the war transformed it called Fall of the House of Dixie, which I found to be an excellent read!

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Believe it or not, I found a site that is much more smug about the love for the Confederacy.

We are often questioned, usually in good spirit, about our impressions of the Southern women. Some are mildly curious, many sincerely interested in our purpose, and a few are mistakenly quite confused and a bit piqued by "Northern" girls reenacting Southern women.

Apparently, the answer is they can do southern women better than southern women.

As far as we can observe, feminism in its modern manifestation was not prevalent until the late 1800's and even then only amongst the lowest of society representative of European licentiousness. However, even if feminism were the normative context, we would yet desire to represent the remnant faithful to God in any given society. As in every area of life, we are primarily concerned with reforming culture to God's standards through accurate representation of history rather than simply reenacting the lowest supposed common denominator in any given society.

Further than this, we aspire to portray superiority of intellect and education characterized by quiet humility, not snobbish arrogance. With a thorough knowledge of the facts of the war, history and theology similar to what women like Anna Jackson, or the Lee daughters would have been familiar with, we would avoid the representation of loud, ignorant, Southern country bumpkins.

:roll: :evil-eye: In other words, forget accuracy and forget what the majority of people endured. They have their fantasy and they are sticking to it.

We are not averse to representing poverty. Frankly, fortitude and self-sufficiency in hardship intrigue us in many ways reminiscent of the challenging pioneering lifestyle. However, Dabney wrote in the Life and Campaigns of Stonewall Jackson that the South was characterized by "...gallant gentlemen and their reputable dependents"

Very gallant, beating men and women with whips or raping women so that they produce slave kids for you. Oh wait, the only people that matter are wealthy whites.

Dabney's description is particularly obnoxious to the egalitarian Northern industrialist who favors equal distribution of wealth and libertarianism.

And

Aversion to the "aristocratic, agrarian, multi-generationaly prosperous South" concept has only grown in society to the present day.

WHAT THE FUCK! One word...slaves. Southern plantation owners had other humans as property! :pull-hair:

handmaidensofheaven.blogspot.com/search?q=feminine

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writing of mary chestnut,famous southern diarist and plantation mistress.

I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes, not when they do wrong. Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can't name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over. Thank God for my country women, but alas for the men! They are probably no worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be….

Martha Adamson is a beautiful mulattress, as good looking as they ever are to me. I have never seen a mule as handsome as a horse, and I know I never will; no matter how I lament and sympathize with its undeserved mule condition. She is a trained sempstress, and “hired her own time, as they call it; that is, the owner pays doctor’s bills, finds food and clothing, and the slave pays his master five dollars a month, more or less, and makes a dollar a day if he pleases. Martha, to the amazement of everybody, married a coal-black Negro, the son of Dick the Barber, who was set free fifty years ago for faithful services rendered Mr. Chestnut’s grandfather. She was asked: How could she? She is so nearly white. How could she marry that horrid Negro? It is positively shocking! She answered that she inherits the taste of her white father, that her mother was black.
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Believe it or not, I found a site that is much more smug about the love for the Confederacy.

:roll: :evil-eye: In other words, forget accuracy and forget what the majority of people endured. They have their fantasy and they are sticking to it.

handmaidensofheaven.blogspot.com/search?q=feminine

Nearly all early feminists were from families which valued education & had money. Jane Austen, the Brontes, LM & Abba Alcott, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Pankhursts, Florence Nightingale. Nobody else had time to stop and ponder life. Hence the sudden rise in the 50s when women were freed from menial domestic tasks.

This person needs to read a few non VF books.

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Nearly all early feminists were from families which valued education & had money. Jane Austen, the Brontes, LM & Abba Alcott, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Pankhursts, Florence Nightingale. Nobody else had time to stop and ponder life. Hence the sudden rise in the 50s when women were freed from menial domestic tasks.

This person needs to read a few non VF books.

I don't think that the actually care about reality.

It is offensive when southerners pretend the Civil War was about state's rights and that slavery wasn't as horrible as it really was. However, at least I slightly understand the emotional reason for some southerners to pretend that their ancestors weren't fighting for an evil cause but why would a northerner want to glorify the Old South?

Essentially, we want to represent the women we would wish to be in that era: Christian women in the service of our King. This means that while studying historical documentation on dress and custom, we will not necessarily portray the most common women found in pictures or journals from the South. After all, were our descendants to reenact our lives, we could hope they would not find us entirely characteristic of our era!

In other words, reality be damned. They want to wear pretty dresses and pretend to be a type of woman that never existed. Historical accuracy isn't going to get in their way

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I just finished an excellent book called The Plantation Mistress by Catherine Clinton, a historian from Harvard who researches women in the south. Clinton makes it quite clear that the mistress of a plantation was no shrinking violet, but was expected to shoulder the burdens of much of the "women's work" around the plantation, up to and including planting and harvesting crops, maintaining a kitchen garden, preserving vegetables and fruit, making candles, rugs, bed and kitchen linens, and overseeing the basic daily tasks-- cooking, cleaning, sewing, laundry, and so on. Like Ellen O'Hara, she was working before sunrise and well after sunset. Mistresses of frontier plantations-- the early years of settlement in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana-- had it much worse. The whole book is a good read, although I think she makes some sweeping generalizations that could be disproven.

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plus being pregnant often and the real worry each and every time about long agonizing labors that had a good chance to leave you dead and/or the baby leaving your kids motherless. a bad miscarriage could do the same.

a French visitor said he found American women charming and adorable at 15,faded at 23,old at 35, decrepit at 40...and wondered why American women were so eager to marry when they would just be houskeepers.

and that description is the same for most fundy women today :cry:

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a French visitor said he found American women charming and adorable at 15,faded at 23,old at 35, decrepit at 40...and wondered why American women were so eager to marry when they would just be houskeepers.

and that description is the same for most fundy women today :cry:

Sooooooo depressing. (In the book Gone with the Wind, didn't it say Scarlett's mother was considered middle-aged at 32? I know people in all walks of life tended to live shorter lives and not just in the antebellum South...but I just remember reading about Scarlett's mother's life and all the social hypocrisy concerning women, and it made me mad. Still can't stand that story!)

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after her one true love was denied her, all the passion and spark ellen o'hara had evaporated and she became gentle,perfect humor less shell. that was one small part of her character she got from ellen...the ability to fixate on one man for years.

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The other thing Clinton makes clear is that expecting women to perform these skills and domestic tasks were *not* a result of the labor shortage during and after "The War Between The States" as many Southern apologists contend, ( :roll: ) but were shouldered during the labor shortage during the Revolutionary War, and were simply continued from there forward. The number of slaves increased dramatically after the Revolutionary War, but new tasks kept getting added to the list that only the mistress of the plantation was supposed to see to personally.

IOW, Southern women were always hard workers doing menial chores, and never were the "gentle flowers" that they were romanticized as.

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For some reason, this blogger's post reminds me of Carol Burnett's "Went With the Wind" parody. Dinah Shore was great

as "Melody". It's super silly and I know I'm dating myself referencing itself. But this is what I'm envisioning as I read

her posts.

Seriously, Minnesota fundie girl would not last one summer in the south, either with or without the wonders of modern

air conditioning.

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It is offensive when southerners pretend the Civil War was about state's rights and that slavery wasn't as horrible as it really was.

It is highly offensive, and I'm a southerner! I would love for these damned fundies to read the actual records of life in the South during, before, and after the Civil War. Most southern women were not wives of rich plantation owners. They worked just as hard as their husbands. They didn't lounge around wearing frilly hoop skirt dresses. During the war, many women lost their husbands, sons, and fathers, were raped, beaten, and turned to prostitution just to feed their kids. Disease was also rampant. The Confederacy was anything but glorious, especially for women. :x :roll:

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Not to mention that whitewashing Southern history means erasing a lot of really awesome Southerners, just because they happened to be Black (slave or free) or anti-slavery. There were abolitionist Southerners and they were amazingly brave.

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Not to mention that whitewashing Southern history means erasing a lot of really awesome Southerners, just because they happened to be Black (slave or free) or anti-slavery. There were abolitionist Southerners and they were amazingly brave.

Pshaw! Don't you know? Only confederate southerners deserve respect, because they were fighting for their rights to own other people!

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