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Dominican University of California

A Requiem to Departed Days: The Transformation and Retrenchment of Planter-Class Women in Georgia

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

<p>During the American Civil War, elite Southern women were required to step outside their traditional role as the protected gender in order to take on responsibilities like supporting Confederate troops, maintaining and operating plantations, supervising slaves, and providing for their families. For planter-class women, advances in personal autonomy were not discarded after the war, however, the more public nature of their postwar activities was conducted within the confines of a traditional gender construct, constrained by overarching issues of race and class. The diaries and journals left by four Georgia women, Eliza Frances Andrews, Mary Sharpe Jones, Frances Butler Leigh, and Ella Gertrude Thomas, all women whose families had an enormous stake in the plantation culture of the antebellum South, reveal the life-altering changes experienced by them as they struggled to maintain class distinction in the face of Confederate defeat and the destruction of the plantation system.</p>

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Arts
Level thesis:degree_level
Master's Thesis
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Humanities
Year
2009

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Yock, Carolyn P.
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Patricia Dougherty, OP, PhD
  • Martin Anderson, JD, PhD

Subjects

dc:subject × 2

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:scholar.dominican.edu:humanities-print-theses-1273

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Dominican University of California
Base URL
scholar.dominican.edu/do/oai/
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Yock, Carolyn P.. A Requiem to Departed Days: The Transformation and Retrenchment of Planter-Class Women in Georgia. Master's Thesis thesis, 2009. https://scholar.dominican.edu/humanities-print-theses/274