Church Belles: A Ministry for Confederate Women - Tapa blanda

Denvis O. Earls is an assistant professor of Early American History at Wilmington College, a small Quaker school. He and his wife reside in Wilmington, Ohio. Professor Earls has spent a lifetime studying and exploring early American cultures and antebellum social organization. This book is a followup to his 1999 Daughters of God which explored the role of women in the pastorate of Southern churches. Church Belles focuses on the "Great Revival" of 1862-1864 that occurred in Confederate Army ranks during the Civil War. Professor Earls contends that in the absence of pastors from their pulpits, Southern church women went onto the battlefield where they distributed religious tracts, prayer books, Bibles and religious newspapers in the Confederate ranks that directly led to the spread of the Revival and permitted women to acquire skills beyond their domestic realm and later used in business, publishing, nursing and numerous post-war professions. He contends that historians have often sought the facts without seeking the context for historical acts. He writes that "history can only be understood in the full social context of the actors." To understand the mind of the Southern belle, one must look at the domestic life, social and church influences, and the restrictions that her "place" put upon her.