"Our Women Played Well Their Parts": East Tennessee Women in the Civil War Era, 1860-1870

This thesis investigates East Tennessee women in the Civil War era and finds that women experienced a change in roles during wartime, but those changes did not prove lasting. East Tennessee Unionist and Confederate women took on a variety of new roles in wartime, from petitioning government leaders and spying for their cause to relocating their families to safer areas and operating an underground railroad for Union prison escapees. This change in roles did not prove lasting for a number of reasons. First, women did not join together in postwar remembrance groups as they did in other parts of the South because East Tennessee was politically divided for many years after the war. Second, East Tennessee was economically devastated during the war, and the men and women of the region sought to a return to antebellum normalcy and stability. This meant a return to farms and a revival of patriarchy as the accepted social order. Thus, the social and economic geography of postwar East Tennessee meant a return to antebellum roles for East Tennessee women. This would remain the norm in the region until suffrage movements attracted wealthy white women around the turn of the century.