This chapter explores the lives of young women from slaveholding, secessionist families coming of age in a time of great regional strife over slavery's expansion into the new western territories. In so doing, it demonstrates the relevancy of age in determining the gendered experience of those living through the tumultuous years of 1861–1865 and the creation of public memory in the decades following the Civil War. These young women were born between 1843 and 1849, placing them between the ages of twelve and eighteen when the war commenced, and came from middling and elite households with financial ties to the slaveholding South. Members of this age group, who would later be called adolescents, were immersed in their emotional, social, and physical development, and thus in a formative period of their lives. Emerging from their diaries, letters, and reminiscences is a story of how female youths transformed what it meant to be southern and female.