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This paper traces the role and activities of Southern women during the Civil War in William Faulkner's The Unvanquished. Both in fiction and in reality Confederate women acted independently and with strength and courage during this crisis. Faulkner depicts three women characters in this novel. The male narrator, Bayard Sartoris, recalls all of them as "the unvanquished. " Granny Rosa Millard becomes a matriarch while Colonel John Sartoris goes to the battlefield. She performs the role of "master" extremely well, but at the same time she desires to be treated like a "lady" when dealing with the Yankees and even the criminal Grumby. This conflict between genders causes her death. Drusilla Hawk tries to "unsex" herself, after her father and her fiancee are killed in the war. The war denies her the opportunity to function as an antebellum Southern lady, but after the war the older women of the community insist on her reassuming the apearance of a lady. In masquerade she internalizes the male code of violence and revenge, but ultimately pays a penalty for this and is forced to leave Sartoris. Aunt Jenny, whose character is opposite Drusilla's, is the exemplary Confederate Woman. She survives the war with female heroism, and when she comes to Sartoris, she recreates the aristocratic world the war didn't really obliterate. She is a symbol of affirmation and she encourages Bayard's commitment to nonviolence. In her story of the blockade runner she tells Bayard to reject the feminine in the form of Drusilla, "bloody moon." To Bayard, Faulkner's alter ego, "she is intent and grave, and she is wise, too." Today's women could well use Jenny's careful and wise approach to life to extend their gender role.