Phoebe Yates Pember – författare

A Southern Woman's Story is the inaugural volume in the University of South Carolina Press's new paperback series, American Civil War Classics. First published in 1879, the book chronicles Phoebe Pember's experiences as matron of the Confederate Chimborazo Hospital from November 1862 until the fall of Richmond in April 1865. Long an important source in Confederate history, A Southern Woman's Story is also a valuable book for students and scholars of women's history and the social history of the Civil War. In many ways Phoebe Yates Pember (1823-1913) was a representative upper-class gentlewoman. Daughter of a Jewish merchant of Charleston who moved his family to Savannah in the 1850s, she sought ways to help the Southern cause but she broke all stereotypes by the character and length of her service. Widowed and childless in 1861, Pember took the post of matron at the Confederate Army's Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She labored there throughout the war and later recorded her experiences in A Southern Woman's Story. No dilettante's romance or saccharine Lost Cause tale, it is a remarkably frank treatment of Confederate social and medical history. Pember reports on the gossip and scandals from inside the Confederacy's largest hospital and the embattled city of Richmond, presenting bureaucratic personalities and stock characters with insight and humor.

The strength that it took for Yates to do what she did for hundreds of men during the years of the Civil War is astounding. Faced with the insurmountable task of caring for so many, often with so little, she did so with the grace and kindheartedness of a saint. Her story takes you into the heart of the sick and wounded men of the war that pitted brother against brother, telling her story of the many men who could not as their voice was silenced much to early. (Goodreads)