Divided and United: The Women of Marietta During the Civil War

"It's called Divided and United because Marietta women, as with most of Northern Georgia, were divided during the Civil War," Marietta Museum of History curator Amy Reed said. "There were quite a lot of Union supporters as well as Confederacy supporters in the area."

exhibit at the Marietta Museum of History opens April 11. The exhibit will primarily be made up of text and tell the women's perspective on the war and how it affected them.

Featured Marietta women will include Minerva McClatchey, Louisa Fletcher, Jane Glover, Mattie Harris and Georgia Fletcher Cole, among others.

"Women banded together to protect their families more than anything else during the Civil War," Reed said.

The exhibit will also include war era clothing from various donors over the years. Reed said there will be about six or seven full gowns as well as bodices, skirts and under items.

One of the reasons that the museum has so much information from Marietta during the Civil War is that women kept up with the war in letters and journals, Reed said.

"You can't commemorate an anniversary of the Civil War without discussing women's place in society and the war," Reed said.

There are some who say the Confederacy lost the war because of women, Reed explained. "Women were writing letters to the men at war that said they were starving and dying, that they had no food, no crops, no cows, and that the men had to come home.

"Women were writing letters to the men at war that said they were starving and dying, that they had no food, no crops, no cows, and that the men had to come home."

"There was a high disillusion for soldiers, with women saying come home, we need you to come home. So the men did."

Women weren't the cause of the end of the war, but they were a factor, Reed said.

The exhibit will run through October.

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