Varina Davis
Varina Banks Howell Davis (May 7, 1826 – October 16, 1906) was the second wife of the politician Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederate States of America. She served as the First Lady of the new nation at the capital in Richmond, Virginia, although she was ambivalent about the war. Smart and educated, with family in both the North and South, she had unconventional views for her public role, although she supported slavery and states' rights.
Howell Davis became a writer after the American Civil War, completing her husband's memoir. She was recruited by Kate Davis Pulitzer to write articles and eventually a regular column for her husband's newspaper, the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer. In 1891 Howell Davis moved to New York City to live full-time with her daughter Winnie after her husband's death. She acted to reconcile prominent figures of the North and South in the late nineteenth century.
Read more about Varina Davis: Early Life and Education, Marriage and Family, Urban Life in Washington, DC, Confederate First Lady, Postwar, Widow, Legacy and Honors, Work
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“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)