PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Catherine Clinton is Gilbert Denman Endowed Chair of American History at the University of Texas at San Antonio and International Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. She is the author of over a dozen books, including The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South; The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century; Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend; Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars; Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom; and Mrs. Lincoln: A Life. She currently serves as president of the Southern Historical Association.
Clinton's sweeping synthesis is a timely call for rethinking women's roles in the Civil War. Her panoramic view of the existing scholarship, her revealing new histories, and the questions that she raises for the future offer a rich scholarly feast that is useful for undergraduates and seasoned historians alike. --Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University Stepdaughters of History is a timely treatise on the legacy of the Civil War and how Americans both remember and forget the women who dreamt and helped build the landscape with which we reside. The writing is accessible and engaging. Clinton integrates gender studies, political history, and current events into this slim volume and challenges us to continue to build a Civil War historiography that is full and more honest. --Deirdre Cooper-Owens, professor of history, Queens College, CUNY Catherine Clinton delights in disentangling the ambiguities and contradictions of the experiences of southern women, whether they were free or enslaved or rich or poor, in Stepdaughters of History. In this beautifully written volume, she explores how the field of Civil War history has demolished the Lost Cause shibboleths of the devoted mammy and the submissive plantation mistress. Clinton reminds us that history should never offer the comfort of a bedtime story, and in Stepdaughters of History there is plenty for us to ponder late into the night. --Peter Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute and author of The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion Spies, smugglers, nurses, plantation mistresses, liberators of slaves, traders, writers, freedom fighters, wives, and mothers--Catherine Clinton considers the many roles of diverse groups of southern women from the Civil War to the late nineteenth century in these lively and provocative essays. --Jacqueline Jones, author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present
