When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain. Faust chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

Originally published: 1996.

ch. 1.What shall we do?: women confront the crisis -- ch. 2. World of femininity: changed households and changing lives -- ch. 3. Enemies in our households: confederate women and slavery -- ch. 4. We must go to work, too -- ch. 5. We little knew: husbands and wives -- ch. 6. To be an old maid: single women, courtship, and desire -- ch. 7. Imaginary life: reading and writing -- ch. 8. Though thou slay us: women and religion -- ch. 9. To relieve my bottled wrath: Confederate women and Yankee men -- ch. ch. 10. If I were once released: the garb of gender -- ch. 11. Sick and tired of this horrid war: patriotism, sacrifice, and self-interest.