The economic conditions generated by the Civil War and Reconstruction drove rural white pregnant women out of their isolated communities and enabled privileged white women in the cities to assume responsibility for them. United with the rural women by race but divided from them by class, the privileged women challenged the white male prerogative to protect white women and to determine the absolute importance of their chastity. In doing so, they created a space in which the rural women could adapt to city life and be trained in the middle-class standards so necessary to upward mobility in the city. Although the privileged women asserted their right to redefine honour for themselves and their white sisters, they did not challenge the racial hierarchy. Facing an increasingly militarized and masculinized racism and unable or unwilling to confront it, within little more than a decade the privileged women dropped their challenge to male authority and, with it, the opportunity they had offered to pregnant rural women.

The Civil War brought devastation to much of the Tennessee countryside and decimated Tennessee's male population. Close to 200,000 Tennesseans fought on one side or the other during the war. The casualties were so high that according to one historian, ‘a large percentage of families (were) without men, or at least without men able to work’. Even where men were available, the war disrupted their planting and harvesting or destroyed their crops.