Changes

As one travels across the southern United States, it is not unusual to find monuments and memorials to the Confederate dead in many small towns. In fact, these sculptural pieces, often composed of the same statues and plinths from the Monumental Bronze Co. of Bridgeport, Conn., can be found as far north as Pennsylvania and New York. A study in 2016 found some 1,500 monuments still standing.<ref>David A. Graham, "The Stubborn Persistence of Confederate Monuments," <i>The Atlantic</i>, April 26, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-stubborn-persistence-of-confederate-monuments/479751/</ref> While in recent years these monuments have become a new source of political conversation their very erection was a movement by Confederate women.

In the years following the Civil War, Confederate women's efforts at preservation and memorialization led them to form memorial groups who worked to keep the memory of their local dead alive, through obtaining land for Confederate cemeteries, maintaining far-flung grave sites, and erecting public monuments.<ref> Caroline E. Janney, <i>Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause</i>, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 6.</ref> Among the earliest postwar female charitable organizations in the south, these groups were also some of the longest lasting. Often composed of upper-class women, these organizations were female-led though they occasionally included male members, who liaised with the community or completed those tasks considered unseemly for women. These groups, which spread across the south, gave Confederate women outlets for mourning and fueled the creation of the “New Southern Woman”. They paved the way for a variety of other women’s organizations through which elite women created roles for themselves in the community and outside their homes’ domestic spaces.<ref>Cynthia J. Mills, ed, <i>Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory</i>, (Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 2003), xv.</ref>