Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a dynamic history of the South in the years leading up to and following the Civil War -- a history that focuses on the women who made up the fabric of southern life before and during the war and remade themselves and their world after it.

Establishing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and political rights in ways that highlight women's active political role throughout the nineteenth century. She draws on diaries, letters, newspaper accounts,...