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[[File:Confederate_monument_Elmira_NY.jpg|thumbnail|250px|left|Monument to Confederate dead in Elmira, NY]]
As one travels across the southern United States, it is not unusual to find monuments and memorials to the Confederate dead in many small towns. In fact, these sculptural pieces, often composed of the same statues and plinths from the Monumental Bronze Co. of Bridgeport, Conn., can be found as far north as Pennsylvania and New York. A study in 2016 found some 1,500 monuments still standing.<ref>David A. Graham, "The Stubborn Persistence of Confederate Monuments," <i>The Atlantic</i>, April 26, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-stubborn-persistence-of-confederate-monuments/479751/</ref> While in recent years these monuments have become a new source of political conversation their very erection was a movement by Confederate women.
==Working outside the home and political implications==
Originally Confederate monuments were kept within the private sphere, such as within local Confederate cemeteries. Here they memorialized individuals or groups of local dead just as did private tombstones. In this way, women retained their association with the family while also using their grief as a political tool. Soon, however, women's organizations moved their memorial efforts onto public land, frequently with the help of public funding.<ref>Karen L. Cox, <i>Dixie's daughters the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the preservation of Confederate culture,</i>, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 57.</ref> Fundraising for such projects brought women into working relationships with the political and economic elect - contact they had previously only had on a social level.<ref> Mills, Monuments, 12.</ref>It was these fundraising endeavors that allowed for a greater range of elite women's roles in the years following the war, as they were faced with a world very different from that of the first half of the nineteenth century.<ref> Mills, Monuments, xvi.</ref>
The relationships that stemmed from these groups’ publicly-oriented endeavors reflect the changes in the way men and women interacted inside and outside the home. These upper-class white women worked together for a common cause, a theme which would become more and more prevalent across the country towards the end of the nineteenth century.<ref> Mills, Monuments, 134.</ref> While these were not the close bosom friendships many women of the time experienced, they fulfilled the purpose of creating a larger community outside of the home. In the wake of the loss felt by so many households, these organizations served a crucial role in recreating the larger sense of community among the Southern aristocratic class, whether for good or ill.<ref>Mills, Monuments, 134.</ref>
==Presenting a carefully curated image==
[[File:Confederate_Monument,_Raleigh,_NC_-_DSC05866.jpeg|thumbnail|275px|left|Confederate Monument dedicated in 1895 at North Carolina State Capitol]]
Women’s organizers shared similar strategies of commingling displays of mourning together with assemblies designed to ignite fervor for the Confederacy. There was a careful political aim behind the types of imagery used both in their physical monuments and in the ceremonies which surrounded them.<ref>Mills, <i>Monuments</i>, 64.</ref> The scene seen at the North Carolina State Capitol in 1895 shows that imagery to full effect. Confederate widows dressed in black mourning garb created a somber presence lightened only by a young blonde, girl-child dressed in the white of youth and purity.<ref> Mills, <i>Monuments</i>, 3.</ref> Other ceremonies included groups of thirteen young girls, representing the various states of the Confederacy – who served to reconnect the image of the Confederacy with innocence and youth. In ensuring that they were seen in feminine terms, they were largely able to protect themselves from the backlash of men who felt they had overstepped the bounds of accepted gender roles.<ref> Janney, <i>Burying the Dead</i>, 108.</ref>
