Quick Take Mary Boykin Chesnut, a Confederate diarist, admitted that slavery’s “monstrous system” scarred white women too. She exposed the torment caused by widespread sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the shame it brought into white households. References Chesnut, Mary Boykin. A Diary from Dixie (1905). Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (2003). Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War