In Gone with the Wind, the Civil War puts women in a position where they must fend for themselves while the men are away in combat. When Scarlett arrives at Tara during the war, the plantation is on the brink of either being taken by Yankees or falling into ruin and disrepair and being swallowed up again by the wilderness. Scarlett’s love for the land emboldens her to save it at whatever cost. At Tara, Scarlett toils like a man would’ve done in the pre-war society. She realizes that the feminine virtues her mother taught her are useless in a world where one has to fight to survive. For this reason, she comes to value the fight she sees in other women around her: it is only after she sees that Melanie make motions to kill the Yankee intruder, for instance, that Scarlett can move past her petty jealousies and admire Melanie.
Over the course of the war, Scarlett uses her femininity as a tool to help her gain power so she can survive poverty and hardship. In order to charm Rhett Butler and convince him to give her money, for instance, she makes a dress out of curtains—and then uses her sexuality to lure Frank Kennedy into marrying her. Beyond her sexuality, however, Scarlett also discovers that she has a knack for business. She takes over the management of Frank’s sawmill and because of her business sense and willingness to act in an “unwomanly” way, she ultimately becomes richer than most Atlantan men do. In this way, the novel shows how the war upends traditional gender roles in Southern society: Ashley Wilkes, although the picture of a perfect man before the war, struggles to do anything for himself and relies on Scarlett’s charity after the war. Scarlett discovers that there’s nothing she can’t do—she can save Tara, make money, and kill Yankees.
However, the novel also shows how Scarlett’s fierce desire to survive keeps her from understanding human nature and, in turn, keeps her from finding happiness and love. She doesn’t realize she doesn’t love Ashley, or that Rhett loves her, until the very end of the novel—up to that point she’d only used her femininity to manipulate men, not to genuinely engage in romance. So while Scarlett experiences monetary success over the course of the novel, her focus on amassing power by exploiting others means that she’s never able to achieve real happiness in her romantic relationships or friendships.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Women and Power ThemeTracker
Women and Power Quotes in Gone with the Wind
“Only when like marries like can there be happiness.”
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for ‘tis the only thing in the world that lasts.”
It was a man’s world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness.
There was something exciting about this town with its narrow muddy streets, lying among rolling red hills, something raw and crude that appealed to the rawness and crudeness underlying the fine veneer that Ellen and Mammy had given her. She suddenly felt that this was where she belonged, not in serene and quiet old cities, flat beside yellow waters.
Nothing her mother had taught her was of any value whatsoever now and Scarlett’s heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her that Ellen had could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization in which she raised her daughters, […] that Ellen looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful.
Now, struggling against hatred for Ashley’s wife, there surged a feeling of admiration and comradeship. She saw in a flash of clarity untouched by any petty emotion that beneath the gentle voice and dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel, felt too that there were banners and bugles of courage in Melanie’s quiet blood.
She came to the end of the long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness.
A woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett. […] She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed [Tara] without men to help her until Will came. Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help!
[Scarlett] could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him.
She had thought, half an hour ago, that she had lost everything in the world, except money, everything that made life desirable, Ellen, Gerald, Bonnie, Mammy, Melanie and Ashley. She had to lose them all to realize that she loved Rhett—loved him because he was strong and unscrupulous, passionate and earthy, like herself.
She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.
