On Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., the Rowan Rifles Camp 405 Sons of Confederate Veterans will host North Carolina Road Scholar Lynn Salsi, M.A., M.F.A. Salsi will present a program on “Confederate Women as Leaders and CEO’s: A New Destiny”.

Once Southern men marched off to war, women were called on to become the mothers of invention and fill jobs men once occupied. The realities of war caused the roles of women to expand far beyond women’s work into areas never imagined. Those who remained behind, including free women, slaves, immigrants, poor farm wives, wives of workers, and the wealthiest one percent, rose to every occasion and came together for the good of the men they loved.

Confederate women were bound together in “the cause” as they pioneered nursing, managed businesses, worked in manufacturing, contracted gunboats, outfitted regiments and sacrificed all their material possessions to aid the troops. In the end, they buried the dead, erected monuments to honor the men they lost, and preserved the history for ancestors to honor 150 years later.    

Discover the voices of these women found in correspondence, diaries, oral histories recorded by family members, newspaper articles, broadsides, invitations and announcements. The information for this program was drawn mostly from primary sources found at the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Museum of the Confederacy, and United Daughters of the Confederacy Archives.

Salsi is a military author, a member of Military Writers Society of America, and works with veterans to record their histories. She was the was the winner of the 2003 Anne Izard Storytelling Award, six-time winner of the Willie Parker Peace History Book Award for nonfiction books, 2001 American Library Association Notable Book Award, and 2001 North Carolina Historian of the Year.

This project is made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The event will be held in the Stanback Room at the Rowan Public Library and is free to the public.