Challenging History

It's not a surprise, however.

Faust's whole scholarly career has been about finding new ways to look at old subjects. Unlike many historians, colleagues say, she hasn't worked the same ground over and over again. And she's kept writing books that required intense archival research well past the point when tenured academics tend to scale back such digging.

Her early work centered on the intellectual arguments of slavery's prewar defenders -- historical territory that hadn't been much explored because it seems so abhorrent today. Faust had been appalled by the injustice that surrounded her growing up in segregated Virginia in the '50s and '60s. Now she wanted to understand how whole classes of people can get caught up in a shared worldview, to the point that they simply can't see.

Moving on to the Civil War itself, Faust found herself asking questions about the Confederate home front. "Three out of four white men of military age went off to battle," she says, which left white women -- untrained and unprepared culturally for their new role -- to manage slaves and try to keep up agricultural productivity. Going into serious archive-rat mode, she culled evidence from these women's letters and other writings and turned it into "Mothers of Invention," her best-known book.

Published in 1996, "Mothers" vividly evokes the difficulties Southern women had coping with war and social upheaval. Beyond that, it suggests that overburdened and eventually disillusioned women played a larger role in the Confederacy's failure to sustain itself than Civil War historians have recognized.

Some years earlier, Faust had made this suggestion more bluntly in an academic paper. "It may well have been because of its women," she wrote, "that the South lost the Civil War."

Outrage! Controversy! It wasn't just military historians who didn't buy this. Those who favored economic, racial and class-based explanations also rejected Faust's assertion -- as she knew they would.

"I made the assertion in part to be provocative," she says now. Historical work on the Civil War "had been so centered on why the South lost, why the North won."

She wrote her paper as "a way of saying that women need to be more central" to historians' thinking.

'Don't Bother to Apply'

"It's a man's world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that the better off you'll be."

This, as Faust recalled in the preface to "Mothers of Invention," was her own mother's advice, half a century ago, to a daughter who was "refusing to wear dresses" and had joined the 4-H Club "not to sew and can like other girls, but to raise sheep and cattle with the boys."