Focus on Tennessee Confederate Women's Monument and explore the Motivation to erect a women's monument.
In 1881, Jefferson Davis dedicated his book The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government to “The Women of the Confederacy.” His work attempted to reframe the ideals of the Confederate cause, building on the myth of the Lost Cause by introducing the idea of the Southern Gentleman. Historians Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson describe Davis’s work as a “building block in postwar construction of the Lost Cause narrative.” Mills and Smith describe Confederate Women’s Monuments as a product of this same context, arguing that the monuments were meant to combat “‘false’ history about southern gender relations” as well as “‘false’ northern arguments” that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Mills and Simpson explain how these monuments were political statements that attempted to re-establish the Confederate ideals. They argue that these monuments, under the disguise of commemorating women, diverted attention from the claims made against the Confederacy.Historian Suzanne Woolley Smith interprets the Tennessee Women's Monument in similar terms, arguing that the work was shaped by Southerners who recalled the Confederacy as “a golden agrarian period peopled by aristocratic planter families and their contented slaves.” Building on the work of the historian Gaines Foster, she describes “the predominance of women in these commemorative activities as a way of de-emphasizing the political significance of the loss, focusing instead on the affective ramifications– steering post-war activities into the feminine realm of sentiment in order to lessen the shock of the defeat.”: 7
Jefferson Davis Lost Cause Confederate