Never Happier in Her Life

This chapter explores the lives of working-class and poor white women of the border South. Their story reveals the potential of border culture—how it gave a voice and agency to women whose stories could be more easily suppressed in a less fluid community. The border created fertile ground for ideas of mutuality and individualism. While this led many to pursue friendship, love, and partnership in their relationships, elite and middle-class husbands and wives of the border South still often adhered to a social ethic which dictated certain gendered behaviors to men and women. In working-class society, however, these philosophies gave women a greater sense of independence and authority, allowing them to push the boundaries of the household and assert themselves in new ways.

Irreconcilable Differences

This chapter explores the devastating experience of the Civil War in the border South. The chapter opens with the secession crisis, which gave western Virginians their long-awaited opportunity to break away from their eastern neighbors. A close analysis of their debates and rhetoric in the secession convention, as well as in their later constitutional convention, reveals the impact of the border South’s particular form of manhood. Without their unique understanding of hierarchy, restraint, submission, and emotion, western Virginians may not have ventured down the path to statehood. This section demonstrates the importance of gendered ideals, forged within the walls of the household, to the political world. The second half of the chapter reveals how the brutal conflict in the border South reinforced the importance of domestic ties and a sense of mutuality within the home.

To Honor and Obey

In the antebellum era, eastern Virginians embraced a definitive and harsh understanding of divorce and its role in society. There, few filed for divorce, most likely knowing that local courts would be unsympathetic even if they dared risk social disapproval. Those who did choose this path shaped their narratives to meet the community’s understanding of gender and marriage. Petitioners framed themselves as long-suffering spouses forced to choose this most undesirable option. Their cases also reflected a greater acceptance of gender hierarchy in the home, especially through their expectation of wifely obedience.

Stability in the Face of Great Distress

This chapter addresses the impact of emancipation on white marriages in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia during the first eight years following the Civil War, arguing that black emancipation’s effect on white border gender roles was muted by the region’s hybrid culture and antebellum experiences. More specifically, postbellum Kentuckians’ and West Virginians’ rhetoric and motivations for separation remained consistent with their antebellum cases, reflecting a continued desire for mutuality and individualism in their relationships, while Virginians decried the breakdown of racial mastery, connected it with potential disruptions to their hierarchical households, and demanded obedience and loyalty from both former slaves and spouses.

No More, Together

In the antebellum era, border southerners increasingly made use of contractualism in their divorce petitions. Contractualism, or the growing understanding that marriage was not a permanent, sacramental institution but a contractual one with rules, procedures, and escape clauses, allowed more men and women to file for divorce and to use a variety of causes to explain their decision. It was also a dangerous ideal in a society in which so many residents found themselves permanently bound to masters with no legal recourse or escape. Nonetheless, in Kentucky, western Virginia, and Appalachian Virginia, unhappy spouses found an outlet in the local courts and through their use, or manipulation, of legal statutes.

To Form an Enviable Marriage

Before the Civil War, courting couples in Kentucky, western Virginia, and Appalachian Virginia increasingly stated their desire to build marriages based on affection, love, and mutual happiness. They embraced all of these characteristics of marriages, despite the dangerous individualism implied by mutuality in marriage itself. Similarly, this chapter explores the impact of discussions of domesticity on masculinity in the region. Part of a transatlantic shift in masculinity, men in the border South reoriented their focus inward, on the family and the private sphere, embracing a more restrained form of manhood in this era. This chapter also explores how border southerners demanded and received divorces when their partners did not live up to their ideals.