Civil War Wives

Civil War Wives

In Civil War Wives, historian Carol Berkin, author of the acclaimed Revolutionary Mothers, tells the stories of three fascinating 19th-century wives. Her first subject, Angelina Grimké Weld, was a successful abolitionist orator before she married fellow abolitionist Theodore Weld. The next two, Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Civil War general and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, were more completely defined by their marriages. Examined together, these three women’s marriages provide unique perspectives on the turbulent times they lived through and on the social forces that guided and constrained the women of the day. Each of these wives left behind significant written records, allowing their stories to be heard in their own voices, rather than filtered through their famous husbands’ commentaries. And each story is fascinating. Angelina Grimké began life as a pampered and self-absorbed child of South Carolina’s slaveholding planter elite, then renounced her family’s values to become one of the most effective antislavery speakers of the 1830s and one of the first Americans to demand equality for women. Yet when she married her mentor, the abolitionist Theodore Weld, she abandoned her career as a public advocate for a life as wife and mother. Varina Howell, a child of Mississippi’s social elite, had an independent spirit that drew the disapproval of her husband and made her ill-suited to be the first lady of the Confederacy, yet served her well when she was forced to lobby for her husband’s release from prison after the war and made her a great social success when she moved to New York City after her husband’s death. And in Julia Dent Grant’s story we see the domestic archetype of the 19th-century American woman. The daughter of a successful Missouri merchant, Julia Dent lived a childhood she described as “one long summer of sunshine, flowers and smiles,” was swept off her feet by the man she loved, and sacrificed herself completely for her husband and his career. Only after she was widowed did she, in taking upon the task of memorializing her husband, finally find her own voice. Berkin finds common threads in these stories: all three women were born into slaveholding families but ended their lives in the free society of the Northeast. And they all had to grapple with—and resist or accept—the 19th-century ideology that regarded men and women as occupying separate spheres, with the latter always measured against an idealization of “true womanhood.” Drawing from diaries, letters, essays, speeches and memoirs, Berkin brings these wives to vivid life, giving us an intimate look at their famous relationships, and revealing the joys and hardships of being a 19th-century woman.

Hardcover: 384 pages

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc./Random House ( September 01, 2009 )

Item #: 74-0370

ISBN: 9781400044467

Product Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.25 x 0.96 inches

Product Weight: 22.0 ounces