What Is The Representation Of Women In Gone With The Wind

The time period between 1861-1865 is called one of the bloodiest times of American history. Approximately 620,000 men lost their lives during those four years, which was around 2% of the population of The United States at the time. The Civil War didn’t start as a war over slavery, but eventually progressed into one that would decide the future of four million people: the slaves living in the United States at the time. The stories told about the Civil War mostly focus on the men on the front, people in the North who supported President Lincoln, and slaves who were freed after the Emancipation Proclamation and the events that followed the Civil War. The story of Gone With The Wind, written as a book by Margaret Mitchell, and produced into film by David Selznick, is all about the women, the people who stayed home, the people on the losing side of the war. Gone With The Wind follows a woman named Scarlett O’Hara through her life as a Southern belle and her progression from a rich child to poor woman who regains her fortune by going against societal ideals of women. It also portrays many black characters such as Mammy, Scarlett’s matronly nurse, Prissy, the stereotyped servant who is constantly seen as the brunt of the joke, and Big Sam, who serves as a hero for Scarlett once but is never mentioned again. Selznick uses the female and black characters in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind to portray the oppression forced on both women and people of subjected races during the