A former Mississippi State University professor and Starkville native will be giving a lecture on the Role of Women in the Civil War on Wednesday at the second annual Social Studies Teachers Summer Institute held on the university’s campus.
Martha Swain, who is also Professor Emeritus of History at Texas Woman’s University, will be speaking in the Templeton Room at Mitchell Memorial Library at 11:00 on Wednesday. She is one of several guest speakers this week, including the former chief historian of the National Park Service Dwight Pitcaithley.
The institute, which began on Sunday, is designed to help prepare the educators to better teach the 19th century Civil War to 21st century students. The week is packed with events. Bobby Horton, one of the country’s leading authorities on music from the Civil War period, performed Monday night, and the teachers will be traveling to Jackson, Shiloh and Vicksburg where they will tour battlefields and military parks.
Grant Association executive director and retired MSU faculty member, John Marszalek, said based on the evaluations received from last year’s participants, the Institute has been a great help to the teachers.
Swain actually did her primary research and writing in the Roosevelt/Truman Era, but she said once she began delving into Civil War Era correspondence, she was captivated.
“Once you get into readings and essays and primary material for the research for women’s roles during the civil war, it’s just very, very rich,” Swain said. “There is one collection right here in the Mississippi State Special Collection called the Horn Papers that has letters written by 23 women.”
Swain will be speaking mostly on the everyday life for a woman living in the south during the Civil War, many of whom were isolated on small farms. She said these women struggled to keep everything in order, picking up as many extras jobs as possible. These women also had to deal with union forces or stragglers that would come through and take what little they had. Swain said that if a woman was not a homemaker, she was most likely a nurse
Swain said she has read countless pages of correspondence over the years and has developed a keen knowledge of certain women in the state, bearing witness to their hardships through their own words.
“There’s Amanda Worthington who lived on a plantation near Greenville; she spoke of the troops taking 160 slaves and a great deal of cotton which they had about 200 bails of,” she said. “Then you have Cordelia Scales, a nurse from Holly Springs … she said that every home in the area had taken in wounded or sick soldiers, and that for five days, she didn’t take her clothes off, taking care of those soldiers night and day. She said that she wished she could be a soldier but she would just have to be a Florence Nightingale.”
There was also the occasional outlier, as with any group, and one of the most interesting women Swain said she had found was certainly an outlier. Bell Edmundson was born in Pontotoc, but lived right outside Memphis, and was a spy for the confederacy.
“Smugglers would go into Memphis and she would bring them goods that they needed but didn’t have access to because of the martial law in effect,” Swain said. “She got wind that there was an order out for her arrest and left town and ended up in Waverly in 1864.”
Swain said that very little is known about black women’s lives during this time period, whether they were free or slave, neither of which seemed to have kept journals.
“I have never seen anything that was left by way of journals or letters,” she said. “Most of what we know about black women experiences comes from statements that were made when their husbands would apply for pensions after the war.”
Swain said she thinks, overall, women came out of the Civil War determined to do more, to have more control than they had before and to be better educated. She pointed to the women’s suffrage movement and the temperance movement as at least partly driven by this renewed spirit southern women had after the war.
She said she hopes people walk away from her lecture with a better understanding of the everyday life of the average woman during this time period, realizing how forced they were to adapt to life without the presence of men, and how they made changes to adapt. She also hopes to explain how the social monetary stratifications went virtually unchanged, even after such a devastating blow to the economy and way of life.
“There are of course the extremes. You can read where this woman tied herself up to a plow, in the absence of a mule and had her kid behind her with the plow handles going down the boroughs,” Swain said. “But, a lot of the work could not be done and a lot of their homes fell into disrepair. Their crops would fail and they would really suffer. One woman said they were living on butter and cornbread, she said ‘at least we have the cow and the corn.'”
The Social Studies Teachers Summer Institute is sponsored by the Vicksburg National military Park, the Shiloh National Military Park, the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, and the MSU Libraries.
For more information contact Elizabeth Coggins at 325-4552 or [email protected]
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