The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate[1] hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.

[11][12] The group was founded on September 10, 1894, by Caroline Meriwether Goodlett and Anna Davenport Raines as the National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy.

[16] The communications studies scholar W. Stuart Towns notes the 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."

[20] 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.

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.

[22] The UDC was influential primarily in the early twentieth century across the South, where its main role was to preserve, uphold and romanticize the memory of the Confederate veterans, especially those husbands, sons, fathers and brothers who died in the Civil War.

[2][23] Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall notes that the UDC had a particular interest in the position of Southern (Confederate) women, with "a commitment to bolstering vanquished and disheartened veterans and keeping the memory of the dead alive.

[citation needed] In 1933 the Tennessee branch of UDC donated $50,000 for the construction of a Confederate memorial hall on the campus of the George Peabody College for Teachers which merged with Vanderbilt University in 1979.

Later, women began adding more of their own experiences to the "public discourse about the war," in the form of memoirs, such as those published in the early 1900s by Sara Pryor, Virginia Clopton, Louise Wright and others.

These memoirs were part of the growing public memory about the antebellum years and the Lost Cause narrative, which critics have described as white supremacist, as they vigorously defended the Confederacy and its founding principles (which included the enslavement of African Americans).

We therefore pledge ourselves to preserve pure ideals, to honor the memory of our beloved Veterans, to study and teach the truths of history (one of the most important of which is that the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery), and always to act in a manner that will reflect honor upon our noble and patriotic ancestors.The phrase "nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery" was deleted by the UDC General Convention of 2015.

[40][3] During the early morning hours of May 31, 2020, the Memorial to the Women of the Confederacy headquarters building in Richmond was vandalized with graffiti and set ablaze during a chain of protests across the city in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

"Rallying behind powerful women such as Mildred Lewis Rutherford, the UDC relentlessly lobbied legislatures for public school textbooks that presented a pro-Confederate version of regional history and successfully blacklisted" other books.

"By targeting the region's middle- to upper-class children, they ensured an army of future teachers and leaders would carry forward and defend their message for decades to come.

Embedding their version of Confederate history into the sacred spaces of Southern society (the home, cemeteries, churches, city squares, street names, colleges and schools) made erasing it physically difficult and personally painful.

"[45] During the period 1880–1910, the UDC was one of many groups that celebrated Lost Cause mythology and presented "a romanticized view of the slavery era" in the United States.

[49][50] More recently, historian James M. McPherson has said that the UDC promotes a white supremacist and neo-Confederate agenda: I think I agree a hundred percent with Ed Sebesta, though, about the motives or the hidden agenda not too deeply hidden I think of such groups as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans.

[51]The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) considers the UDC as part of the Neo-Confederate movement, intrinsically white supremacist, that began in the early 1890s.

The SPLC contends that the UDC promotes "a reactionary conservative ideology that has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right, and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.

"[54] According to lawyer Greg Huffman, writing in Facing South, "perhaps nothing illuminates the UDC's true nature more than its relationship with the Ku Klux Klan.

[56] Published near the height of the UDC's Confederate statue-installation and textbook-vetting efforts, the book became a supplementary reader for Southern school children.