What role did gender play in the secession crisis? How did it affect the loyalties of the civilian population during the Civil War? In what ways did it influence the formation of the Ku Klux Klan? How did it affect labor conflict in the postwar textile industry? Why was the first woman U.S. senator from the South? What role did sexuality and gender play in the explosion of racial violence in the late nineteenth century? These questions and many others concerning the critical role that gender played in the major events of the nineteenth-century South and the nation more generally are addressed in this fascinating collection of essays by renowned historian LeeAnn Whites. Together these pieces argue that gender matters not only in the lives of individuals, but also along racial and class lines across the social order. This provocative collection is ideal for classroom use, as it covers a broad chronological scope and range of events in Southern history.

LeeAnn Whites is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies, University of Missouri-Columbia.

"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 story, and how the story shaped gender. Throughout the volume Whites guides the reader to new perspectives on the Civil War and the postwar south, showing how gender was not merely apart from, or subservient to, the familiar forces of race, lclass, and region, but was inextricably woven into the fabric of society. This book is both an important contribution to the scholarship on nineteenth-century America, and a valuable statement about the historian’s craft."--J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida, and author of Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War and Anna Elizabeth Dickinson: A Life in Public