Men

This chapter picks up a question that runs through the Civil War diaries of southern women: what is the tie between men and war, and what will war reveal about men? The question was rich enough to develop into thoughts and speculations about the nature of men, “the harder sex,” and whether the men who opted for war would have an answer to what it meant and how it would end. Diarists reflect (and worry, and sometimes joke) about worldly men who now seemed to improvise far more than they let on. They wrote about duty and morality, and how war shook up how to meet men and what to say to them. And while diarists wrote about the men they knew, they also wrote with curiosity and attraction for new men, the men war brought. So diarists wrote about love, and whether love would stand up to war—a compelling question for women and men at war, though not one often explored by historians. Women’s diaries open a door to such exploration, and to the way a diary’s page captures “timeless” themes amid a diary’s time-bound days.