Daughters of the Confederacy
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Official badge, depicting the "Stars and Bars", the first flag of the Confederacy
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| Abbreviation | UDC |
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| Motto | "Think, Love, Pray, Dare, Live" |
| Established | September 10, 1894 |
| Founders |
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| Founded at | Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Type | 501(c)(3), charitable organization |
| 54-0631483 | |
| Headquarters | Richmond, Virginia, U.S. |
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Membership (2015)
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19,294 |
| Publication | UDC Magazine |
| Subsidiaries | Children of the Confederacy |
| Website | hqudc |
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Formerly called
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National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy |
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, also known as the UDC, is a American hereditary association of Southern women established in 1894. The stated purposes of the organization include, among other things, the commemoration of Confederate soldiers, and one of its main activities has been the funding of the erection of monuments to these men; this and the organization's treatment of the Confederacy as heroic and slavery as harmless along with its promotion of the Lost Cause movement have been viewed by some as white supremacist.
The UDC was established in September 10, 1894, at Nashville, Tennessee, by Caroline Goodlett and Anna Raines. According to the author Kristina DuRocher, the stated aims of the organization included "creating a social network, memorializing the war, maintaining a 'truthful record of the noble and chivalric achievements' of their veterans, and teaching the next generation 'a proper respect for and pride in the glorious war history'."
In 1896, the organization established the Children of the Confederacy to teach the same values to the younger generation, through a mythical depiction of the Civil War and Confederacy designed to rewrite history. According to DuRocher, "Like the KKK's children's groups, the UDC utilized the Children of the Confederacy to impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future."
The communications studies scholar W. Stuart Towns notes UDC's role "in demanding textbooks for public schools that told the story of the war and the Confederacy from a definite southern point of view". He adds that their work is one of the "essential elements [of] perpetuating Confederate mythology".
Across the Southern United States, associations were founded after the Civil War, chiefly by women, to organize burials of Confederate soldiers, establish and care for permanent cemeteries, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor impressive monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate cause and tradition.
The organization was "strikingly successful at raising money to build monuments, lobbying legislatures and Congress for the reburial of Confederate dead, and working to shape the content of history textbooks." They also raised money to care for the widows and children of the Confederate dead. Most of these memorial associations gradually merged into the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which grew from 17,000 total members in 1900 to nearly 100,000 by World War I.
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Wikipedia