Gathering Information
CB: Let's talk about your research process. When you picked Confederate women as a topic, where did you think you were going to go with the paper?
JJ: I didn't really know. I just knew I wanted to show how they played an integral part in the war and that without them a lot of things wouldn't have gotten done. That was all that I was thinking about before I started my research.
CB: Did you think about what your readers would already know about Confederate women?
JJ: No. I didn't really think about that. I started with just women in the Civil War, but I thought that my paper would be too jumbly if I worked on that. I wondered whether I should do Union or Confederate women. I have always been interested in the image of the southern belle, and I had originally thought of these women as southern belles, like in Gone with the Wind. So I decided to work with them, just to see if they really stood around wearing those big poofy dresses, and the fans and stuff.
Then after that I just figured out what sort of sources were required in the assignment. I knew we needed a newspaper source and a journal, and the rest were supposed to be books. So I went to the library and I just searched the library catalog for books and sifted through what came up. I found a couple of good books I really wanted to use, but the library didn't own them. There were also a couple of books that I checked out and found later that they weren't what I wanted. I also found some things on the Internet, like Carrie Berry's journal. That was about it from the Internet. But that came after I had found all of the books.
CB: How did you like using the Internet for research?
JJ: It's so hard to find anything. You punch in something and you get 50,000 hits. I just dread trying to find something on it, because half the stuff is garbage, and the thing you really really want you just can't find. When you think you have found it, it's not available, so that's kind of aggravating for me.
Examine Julie's search results on the University of South Dakota's I.D. Weeks Library catalog,
Try Julie's Web searches with Yahoo!:
with AltaVista:
Can you think of ways that these searches might be refined to eliminate unwanted results?
CB: But it has some potential, doesn't it?
JJ: It will if they can find a way to get rid of all of those stupid home pages. You type in "Women of the Confederacy" and you get a bunch of pornography because the search has the word "women" in it!
CB: [Laughs] So you have to be careful how you search!
JJ: [Laughs] Exactly!
CB: When you were dealing with the books you found, how did you decide which sources to work with and which not to use?
JJ: If it was easy to understand the information, and where the author was coming from, I would use it. But if it is a big thick book and it didn't have an index, and I flipped through and the chapters were not labeled well, I wouldn't use that book. I just didn't have the time to go through and read that entire book to find the information I needed.
CB: Did you find the books easy to read?
JJ: Yes. It was very nice because they all had indexes. So I just went through and read the index and found anything that had to do with women. Once I got familiar with the terms that kept coming up in the text and the women's names, I would go back to the index and look them up as well.
Some of those books were enormous. Mary Chestnut's diary is more than 1000 pages, but she had an index back there, or someone made an index for it, and that made it easier because I could search for the topics I wanted to focus on.
CB: How did you figure out what to look for?
JJ: The research guided me. I would learn something new from one source, then go and look in other sources to see if there was anything more said about it. Some things would match up totally and they would say exactly the same thing, so I would just pick one to say it or else I would generalize it.
In other cases, some authors felt very strongly about some issues and others never mentioned them. Slavery was something sources disagreed about. It was interesting, but kind of confusing too. It was interesting to see how two different writers would interpret something.
CB: What did you do when you had sources that didn't agree. How did you sort them out?
JJ: Most of the time I just mentioned them both in the paper.
CB: You mentioned earlier that you were interested in biographies. Lately autobiographies have become enormously popular, especially the more confessional type. Did you find any of that same confessional quality in any of the autobiographical sources you read about from the Civil War era?
JJ: Well, I had the three journals: of Sarah Morgan, Mary Chestnut, and Lucy Breckinridge. But those didn't seem to be real confessional. In all honesty, I didn't care much for Mary Chestnut's book. That's the one that has received the most praise. But she was drugged up all the time, she had her fainting spells, and I'm like, "so what!" I was not impressed with her, but Sarah Morgan's and Lucy Breckinridge's were really good.
CB: From reading older writing like that, letters and memoirs from the 19th Century, I notice that people wrote very differently from how we write now. How would you describe their style?
JJ: Journals or diaries I might write would be more about what I do every day, who says "hi" to me and that kind of stuff, where they seemed to be more focused on the family and society. They write about the weather too, but they would also write elaborate entries about news events. They would spend a lot of time writing about society and government which they had heard about from newspapers, and they would repeat a lot of what they newspapers say.
CB: Who were these journals intended for? Do you think they were originally meant to be private or did these women have a sense that they these journals were going to be published?
JJ: The three that I read weren't very private, the women were not very intimate with their particular lives.
CB: Do you think that has something to do with the character of southern women? It sounds close to the stereotype, anyway, that even in private writing they would sound distant and proper.
JJ: I don't know. If I would have read Union women's diaries, maybe I could compare them.
CB: I guess what I noticed in the excerpts that you present in your paper is that the language of the diaries is very rhetorical and flowery. One woman says that rape is a "dishonor infinitely worse than death." Later she wonders whether it would be "a sin to think slavery a curse to any land."
JJ: Yeah, I think "flowery" is a perfect word for that.
CB: [Laughs] That's not the way that most people talk!
JJ: No. It's like they thought about what they wrote before they wrote it.
CB: Did that affect the way that you read those journals? I wonder whether certain passages are being written "for art's sake" rather than to express the way the person feels.
JJ: I think they actually felt that way, but they made it for someone else to read. It came across that Confederate women were very intelligent, using such verbose language and everything, but at the same time it did knock their credibility down just a bit.
CB: It's interesting to me to read the quotes you have here about slavery. The women seem to be of two minds about slavery. On the one hand it was part of their "southern identity," it was part of what they were fighting the war for. But I can tell from reading the excerpts in your paper that there was a little embarrassment about slavery as well, that these women felt the need to rationalize slavery. Did you pick this up and what did you think about it?
JJ: I was amazed that the southern women were so divided. I assumed that they would have trusted in slavery, because that was just the way things ran. But the ones that kind of rationalized, deep down you know that they are questioning whether it is really right for slavery to exist.
CB: At the beginning of the paper you mention that one of the plantation mistress' responsibilities was taking care of the slaves, and then later you quote some of the women about their opinions on slavery. Sarah Morgan is very pro-slavery, but Lucy Breckinridge agrees with Mary Chestnut, saying that slavery "is a troublesome institution and I wish for the sake of the masters that it could be abolished in Virginia." She goes on to say, "I am so thankful that all of us have been properly raised and never allowed to scold or strike a servant." I thought that was interesting because on the one hand, they would never scold or strike slaves, but they still kept them as slaves! Did you find that rather curious?
JJ: You read how horrible plantation owners were to their slaves, but then you have someone who is against slavery and says, "We never scolded them or treat them badly." But they're still slaves and servants.
CB: I also noticed one of the women rationalizing that the slaves were brought in by northerners and that if they were kept in the north they probably would have been massacred like the Indians.
JJ: That's quite a big rationalization!
CB: Could you describe how you take notes?
JJ: Most people use note cards, but I don't. I just take out a notebook, and I write down the quote or idea as I read. If it is a quote, I just put quotation marks around it in my notes, then I just put the page number in the margin -- I had sheets and sheets of these for this project. Then when I write the paper, I just cross out things that I use.
Read an excerpt from Julie's research notes
CB: How much of your research ended up in the paper?
JJ: I would say 90% of it, if not more.