"Petticoat Gunboats": The Wartime Expansion of Confederate Women's Discursive Opportunities Through Ladies' Gunboat Societies

This study represents a feminist historiographical recovery of the discursive practices of Confederate women in Ladies' Gunboat Societies in the Civil War South, with particular attention to the rhetoric of club formation, epistolary writing, and networking through national newspapers. A turn toward an examination of process-oriented rhetoric as supported in the work of Andrea Lunsford and Robin Jensen provides a robust framework for the methodology of recovery of non-traditional rhetorical texts in this project. As we explore these process-oriented texts, we discover the material motives Confederate women had for contributing to the war effort in an unprecedented way: the construction of weapons of war. This thesis also discusses the mantle of virtuous nationalism and Republican Motherhood Confederate women appropriated in order to participate in new public and political discursive territory. Contrary to some historiographers' view that these discursive breakthroughs were only temporary and that Southern women did not hold the discursive gains allowed during war time, this thesis maintains that new important gains gave Southern women new rhetorical skills that they would use in the formation of postbellum organizations like Ladies' Memorial Associations.