Chapter 2 recreates winter and spring 1860 in South Carolina, characterized by social calls and events, and demonstrates that while women noted when political events occurred, they quickly returned their thoughts to their daily lives as excessive commentary on electoral politics was improper. It explores a father’s and a daughter’s description of the same event to demonstrate that women’s political consciousnesses were not mere imitations of men’s. It then describes the Democratic National Convention of 1860, held in Charleston, which resulted in the walkout of southern representatives when Stephen Douglas was nominated as presidential candidate. As audience members, women shaped the political discussion and peer-pressured representatives into leaving the convention. Despite its importance in history, the convention quickly faded from women’s conversation, indicating that women did not immediately view this as a life-changing political event.

The final days of 1860 demonstrated a marked difference from the joys of secession just weeks before. Chapter 5 explains the relativity of time for South Carolinians as they rapidly approached secession and then spent the next several months waiting for action. The occupation of Fort Sumter caused women in South Carolina to feel constantly on edge and anticipate war. This chapter discusses melancholy Christmases, comparisons of weather to the state of the Union, and a restless energy that caused the most pacifist of women to long for action. Some women used writing to relieve their tensions, and others could not write. Those that did utilized popular conventions of the sentimental novel to express their political misgivings and describe their subdued holidays. Anxious women increasingly predicted a millenarian end of days and prayed for God to take them to heaven rather than allow them to exist in a world with freed African Americans. This chapter takes seriously these women’s frantic, religious pleas and explores the interrelation between emotions, politics, and religion. It ends on the eve of yet another moment of catharsis: the siege of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Chapter 4 argues that the return of South Carolinian elites from their summer travels by October 1860 marks the end of the antebellum period for the state. By October, men and women alike were unable to avoid discussions of politics, a frenzy which sparked suddenly rather than grew over the summer. Almost all women in this study realized that Lincoln’s impending election brought about a point of no return. This chapter explores how women grappled with this all-consuming political atmosphere, both with religious reservation and wide-eyed patriotism, all within the constraints of political expression considered suitable for “ladies.” It argues that women were more likely to predict the devastating effects of war that disunion would bring and engages with masculinity studies in explaining why men could not, or would not, express similar worry. To make sense of their rapidly changing world, women wove political discussion into letters and diaries alongside social visits, chores, and the weather, and self-consciously defended their right to do so. The chapter closes with the cathartic events surrounding South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.

Chapter 3 unpacks the “sickly season,” or the summer of 1860, characterized by the threat of mosquito-related diseases in the Lowcountry. It argues that South Carolinians’ insistence upon traveling to their usual vacation haunts, often ending their trips in New York City, reveals a still-uncertain political future. During this “season” (roughly late May to late October), South Carolinians felt time slow down, and talk of electoral politics faded to the background. South Carolina women continued to express political thoughts, however, revealing rivalries with Virginians that coexisted with desires to form social, and therefore economic and political, relations at Virginia’s healing and resort springs. The annoyance with Virginia reflects a tension between the two states of who is the true inheritor of the American Revolutionary spirit, and this chapter uses the Mount Vernon Ladies Association to explore shifting perceptions of a federalist and yet southern president. It also describes the increasing anxieties surrounding slave rebellion on the eve of secession, and to what extent enslaved women increased their day-to-day resistance as rumors of disunion spread.

The introduction offers an overview of the book and discusses why studying first ladies matters.

On Saturday, February 28, 1626, the Mansfeld Regiment’s second-in-command Theodoro de Camargo stabbed his wife Victoria Guarde twelve times for sleeping with other men and plotting to kill him. This chapter uses this incident as an entry into a discussion of sex, gender, and family life in seventeenth-century European armies. Before the Industrial Revolution, women and families traveled with armies in large numbers. Armies were sites of male violence against women as well as against other men; these intersected in Camargo’s attempts to assert his authority within a regiment that may not have respected him. Since Guarde described her own actions as attempts to be happy, this chapter also briefly discusses the history of happiness. Although Camargo was acquitted in a rigged trial, the regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner may have disapproved of Guarde’s murder. If so, he said nothing, but he intervened the next time Camargo tried to abuse one of his subordinates.

The interview with Maggie Smales explores the approach and directorial decisions taken in her all-female production of Henry V at 41 Monkgate, York in 2015. Smales set the production at a munitions factory operated by women during the First World War in order to focus on the home-front perspective of female war workers and their sacrifices, drawing on the history of a local factory and the lives of local women who worked there. The women’s enactment of the text is the device used for a re-examination of Henry V’s significance in the context of the First World War.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

Gender has always shaped rights in particularly visible ways, from the supposedly abstract, universal and gender-neutral civil and political rights articulated in the French Revolution of 1789, to the twenty-first century, where rights are claimed on the basis of membership in specific groups. Throughout this long period of over two-and-a-quarter centuries, sexual difference has complicated concepts of rights and how they have been recognised and put into practice. This chapter explores these complexities and questions the very category of ‘socio-economic’ rights.  Examining the place of sexual difference in conceptualising rights and duties demonstrates that whereas employers and the state acknowledged economic rights and social rights for men, economic rights did not automatically accompany social rights for women. Indeed, these two sets of rights were often at odds, as women’s problematic economic citizenship in France illustrates.