Drew Gilpin Faust. “‘Without Plot or Compass:’ Elite Women and Religion in the Civil War South.” In Religion and the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 250–260.
Reviewed by Monique Moultrie
Drew Gilpin Faust is a professor of History at Harvard University and the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Women of the southern evangelical culture, both enslaved and free, have been historically understudied, and in this essay Drew Gilpin Faust unearths the experience of white elite women in this culture. She primarily concentrates on women in the elite master class for whom religion served an “important instrument of support, of self-examination…and self transformation” (p. 251). For men and women, religion was touted as justification for the Civil War as ministers dually preached patriotism and consolation. Yet, for elite women, religion also provided a “new language with which to scrutinize public affairs,” since through the confines of religion (long considered a central component of the female sphere) doors were opened into the male world of politics and public life (p. 252).
Faust contends that women organized prayer groups across their communities to acclimate themselves to leadership into these realms. Unfamiliar with both increased responsibilities in their homes and in their church, religion became the mode by which these women found the courage to step from their previous roles into larger ones. For instance, political petitioning for their husbands’ discharge or for economic support were unfurrowed territory for these elite women, but they forged forth, propelled to pursue their own best interests (p. 257).
Faust also notes that at the same time civilian religion became “domesticated—located and performed within the family and the home”—because church buildings had been damaged and transportation to take them to services had been commandeered for the war (p. 254). Thus, in prayer groups and church services women acted as lay-leaders while their men were away, which resulted in a change away from the church’s focus on conversion toward an emphasis on practice.
After several key military setbacks, God had become “more the God of Jacob than of Jesus,” and women began searching their actions for deeds that might be incurring God’s wrath, encouraging their male relatives to do the same (p. 253). Faced with their loved ones’ potential death, they encouraged their spouses to become pious men so that if nothing else, their souls would not be lost if the war was. These elite women who had previously lived in God’s supposed favor had to change their mentality to reflect their humbling. As Faust aptly reiterates, these women were aware that neither religion nor society would be as it had been before the war. The essay highlights the sharp reality that white southern women faced—the “dangers of passively depending upon God or man,” because for the first time they had felt unprotected by God and circumstances (p. 258). Yet, she concludes, they came through the situation changed and subsequently changed the postwar country. Thus, she deems this period as the burgeoning of a new independence and as time when “women themselves would feel compelled to serve as both pilot and compass” (p. 258).
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