Trials and Triumphs (PDF)

In Trials and Triumphs, Marilyn Mayer Culpepper provides incomparable insights into women's lives during America's Civil War era. Her respect for these nineteenth-century women and their experiences, as well as her engaging and intimate style, enable Culpepper to transport readers into a tumultuous time of death, destruction, and privation — into a world turned upside down, an environment that seemed as strange to contemporaries as it does in our own time.Culpepper has uncovered forgotten images of America's bloodiest conflict contained in the diaries and correspondence of more than 500 women. Trials and Triumphs reveals the anxiety, hardship, turmoil and tragedy that women endured during the war years. It reveals the fierce loyalty and enmity that nearly severed the Union, the horror of enemy occupation, and even the desperate austerity of an itinerant refugee life. Just as the Civil War influenced culture and government, it shaped the attitudes of a new breed of pioneering woman. As the war progressed, either by choice or by default, men turned over more and more responsibility to women on the home front. As a result, women began to break free from the "cult of domesticity" to expand career opportunities. By war's end, women on both sides of the conflict proved to themselves and to a nearly shattered nation that the appellation "weaker sex" was a misnomer. Originally published in 1992, this revised paperback edition includes a new index.