Linda Berger

Tuesdays, March 6 - April 3 10:00 a.m. -12noon 5 sessions
Prescott House, 55 Beacon Street

Of all the wars that occurred in the history of the United States, the Civil War is the only one fought so intensely in the midst of the lives of its women. Not only was it fought in their houses and fields, towns and cities – but it decimated their families, and destroyed the life styles and culture of their way of life.

This course looks at some of those individual women, through their own personal diaries, journals and memoirs. A popular form of expression in the 19th century, the writings of Mary Chesnut, Kate Stone, Belle Boyd, and Rose Greenhow, to name a few, take us into the lives they lived in the war as wives and mothers, nurses and spies, and co-sharers of their husband’s presidencies--as in the case of Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Davis.

Our source text will be Mothers of Invention, by Drew Gilpin Faust, current president of Harvard. Our course will conclude with the required reading of the book that expressed in the most historically romantic way all there was to say about the women in the South and how they lived through the war – Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell.

Linda Berger

Linda Berger is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She has a BS and an MS in education and engaged in doctoral studies in educational psychology.