Membership

The two women pictured to the right came together to officially create the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Nashville in 1894. The goals of the organization are as follows: 

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1. To honor the memory of those who served and those who fell in the service of the Confederate States.

2. To protect, preserve and mark the places made historic by Confederate valor.

3. To collect and preserve the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States.

4. To record the part taken by Southern women in patient endurance of hardship and patriotic devotion during the struggle and in untiring efforts after the War during the reconstruction of the South.

5. To fulfill the sacred duty of benevolence toward the survivors and toward those dependent upon them.

6. To assist descendants of worthy Confederates in securing proper education.

7. To cherish the ties of friendship among the members of the Organization.

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In the minds of Confederate women, their war was controlling the history of the war. This was a war they did not intend to lose. The Civil War granted women a role in the public sphere which they could have used as an opportunity for increased independence and autonomy, however, historians like LeeAnn Whites present the evidence that rather than furthering the impairment of southern white manhood, elite southern women put a great amount of effort into rebuilding the southern white man. They did so with their education tactics and monuments, dedicating reconstruction to the men in true accordance with antebellum female character. In this demonstration, women were exercising a new sense of responsibility while still maintaining a level of comfort in the subordination to men they were accustomed to, which they felt was the natural order. 

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The United Daughters of the Confederacy and similar groups offered women the domestic stability previously lost to the war. Their sentimental patriotism was intrinsic to their femininity which personalized the South, successfully imprinting the Lost Cause narrative. Conducting their new found duties in a group setting served as a comfortable way to transform themselves into a new form as they had often taken on roles in this way such as duties within the church or immediate community.