Exploring the gendered dimension of political conflicts, Laura Edwards links post-Civil War transformations in private and public life. She illustrates how ideas about men's and women's roles within households shaped the ways groups of southerners--elite and poor, whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans--envisioned the public arena and their own places in it. By using those on the margins to define the center, Edwards demonstrates that Reconstruction was a complicated process of conflict and negotiation that lasted beyond 1877 and involved all southerners and every aspect of life.