Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South

Scarlett’s Sisters explores the meaning of nineteenth-century southern womanhood from the vantage point of the celebrated fictional character’s flesh-and-blood young, elite, white women. Anya Jabour demonstrates that southern girls and young women faced a major turning point when the Civil War forced them to assume new roles and responsibilities as independent women. By tracing the lives of young white women in a society in flux, Jabour reveals how the South’s old social order was maintained and a new one created as southern girls and young women learned, questioned, and ultimately changed what it meant to be a southern lady.