Gender Matters (PDF)

LEEANN WHITES is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA.

"In her powerful and persuasive series of essays, Gender Matters, covering everything from women's roles in the Civil War South to the first woman (Georgian Rebecca Latimer Felton) to serve in the United States Senate to feminist challenges to white supremacists in the late 20th century, LeeAnn Whites convinces us not only that gender does matter, but that the struggle to understand the influence of status and sexuality on American history should move to center stage. Whites demonstrates with her elegant and impressive historical case studies that by moving gender to the forefront, we can better appreciate historical agency, placing sex within a powerful nexus of interlocking issues such as class, region and race. Whites not only proves her proposition that gender matters, but offers trenchant, insightful criticism about why gender, and why struggles, must continue." - Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman, The Road to Freedom

"Taking us far beyond a 'brothers' war,' LeeAnn Whites demonstrates the centrality of gendered behavior and discourse to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Whether discussing men's wartime rhetoric, women's contributions to the Myth of the Lost Cause, or racial terrorization in the post-bellum South, her analysis of gender and class as underlying factors in the creation of a racially-segregated New South is unparalleled. This collection of essays will stimulate lively debates among students of the Civil War and nineteenth-century South." - Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War

"In this superb collection of essays LeeAnn Whites illustrates just how much gender really does matter. Whites has a particular gift for the clever, evocative essay that forces the reader to examine evidence from new angles. Here she has strung together a series of small jewels, demonstrating how both the familiar and the unexplored are better understood when we pay attention to how gender shaped the