In this engaging study, Christine Jacobson Carter uncovers the fruitful and interesting lives of single women--and the attitudes toward them--in the bustling urban centers of nineteenth-century Savannah and Charleston.

Carter's focus is on educated, financially secure white women who joined in the culture's celebration of domesticity even though they had not married. Making effective use of contemporary fiction, advice literature, diaries, and letters to, from, and about single women, Carter shows that such women valued independence and female friendships and were in turn valued for family and community service. She also explores their attitudes toward personal fulfillment, the relationships that sustained (and sometimes tormented) them, and the impact of the Civil War as well as the southern and urban aspects of their public and private identities.