Sisterhood of the Lost Cause

Jennifer Lynn Gross is professor of history at Jacksonville State University.

"A groundbreaking study of Confederate widowhood and a 'must have' addition to the literature on southern women. Based on extensive archival research, Gross's poignant reflection on countless widows' lives maps their journeys of mourning, survival, writing, memorialization, and, eventually, their 'reward' in receiving a widow's pension. A timely book that repositions Confederate widowhood and its ties to Lost Cause mythology." - Marie S. Molloy, author of Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South "Through remarkable primary-source research that is both wide-ranging and deep, Jennifer Gross uncovers what Confederate widowhood meant to white southern women-and to a society that made them the symbolic center of its quest to restore white men's power after the Civil War." - Amy Murrell Taylor, author of the award-winning Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps "Jennifer Gross offers a detailed study of Confederate widows, exploring how they grieved, coped with their loss, and why they became powerful postwar symbols of idealized white southern womanhood. This is an important book, helping to fill a surprising gap in the historiography of southern history." - Lesley J. Gordon, author of Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War "In Sisterhood of the Lost Cause, Jennifer Gross considers the tens of thousands of Confederate widows that constituted an imposing cohort in late nineteenth-century America. Bowed in grief, 'manless in a patriarchal world,' the majority negotiated a creative and calculated status as Lost Cause advocates. From the pens of best-selling authors to the petitions of husbandless wives, millions of manuscript pages left behind by these scribbling survivors are subjected to intense scrutiny. Gross's extensive excavation illuminates white women's critical influence-resulting in the ascendancy of Confederate memorials, so key to understanding controversies in today's southern historical landscape." - Catherine Clinton, author of Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War