UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item "The Quiet Battles of the Home Front War": Civil War Bread Riots and the Development of a Confederate Welfare System(1986) Barber, Edna Susan; Grimsted, David A.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)During the American Civil War, more than a dozen food riots erupted in a number of Southern cities. Planned and executed largely by women, these riots were precipitated by extreme food shortages and high market prices, both the result of impressment activity and widespread speculation in foodstuffs. Although several scholars have examined the largest riot which occurred in Richmond, Virginia, in 1863, none have studied them collectively to determine the impact all of these riots exerted on the Confederate war effort or on the roles of Southern women in wartime. Nor has any attempt been made to place these riots in the context of American and European patterns of rioting. In response to riots or as attempts to prevent riots from occurring, a number of state and local governments moved to establish welfare programs to aid the women left destitute by the war. In cities, this took the form of free markets which distributed commodities donated by local farmers. In areas where the population was more dispersed, county or state relief agencies performed a similar function. Women who received supplies had to meet specific requirements to qualify for aid, and, at least in Richmond, the female rioters were excluded from the welfare program because their behavior violated traditional behavioral norms. As the war neared its conclusion, however, this type of riotous activity by Southern women ceased, and the women returned to their more traditional roles in nineteenth-century Southern society. When examined as a group, these riots tend to conform to traditional European food riot patterns such as those described by E.P. Thompson and Louise Tilly, thus giving the women's activities a broader and deeper historical context than they otherwise would have had.Item "Sisters of the Capital": White Women in Richmond, Virginia, 1860-1880(1997) Barber, Edna Susan; Gullickson, Gay L.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation examines the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on elite, middle-, and working-class white women in Richmond, Virginia. Anne Firer Scott has written that the Civil War was a historical watershed that enabled southern women's movement into broader social, economic, and political roles in southern society. Suzanne Lebsock and George Rable have observed that claims about white Southern women's gains must be measured against the conservatism of Southern society as the patriarchy reasserted itself in the postwar decades. This study addresses this historiographical debate by examining changes in white Richmond women's roles in the workforce, in organizational politics, and the churches. It also analyzes the war's impact on marriage and family relations. Civil War Richmond represented a two-edged sword to its white female population. As the Confederate capital, it provided them with employment opportunities that were impossible before the war began. By 1863, however, Richmond's population more than doubled as southerners emigrated to the city in search of work or to escape Union armies. This expanding population created extreme shortages in food and housing; it also triggered the largest bread riot in the confederacy. With Confederate defeat, many wartime occupations disappeared, although the need for work did not. Widespread postwar poverty led to the emergence of different occupations. Women had formed a number of charitable organizations before the war began. During the war, they developed new associations that stressed women's patriotism rather than their maternity. In the churches, women's wartime work led to the emergence of independent missionary associations that often were in conflict with male-dominated foreign mission boards. Although change occurred, this study concludes that white women's experiences of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Richmond, Virginia, were far more complex than Scott's notion of a historical watershed indicates. The wartime transformation in women's lives was often fraught with irony. Many changes were neither sought nor anticipated by Richmond women. Several came precisely as a direct result of Confederate defeat. Others tended to reinforce patriarchal notions about white women's subordinate status in Southern society.