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4.0 out of 5 stars
Gender and the Civil War, September 19, 2009
This review is from: Gender and the Sectional Conflict (The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era) (Hardcover)
The American Civil War can be illuminated from many perspectives. Although most studies of the war focus upon political or military issues, or upon slavery, a growing number of scholars have been examining the Civil War from the standpoint of gender relations. Among the most prominent of these scholars is Nina Silber, Professor of History at Boston University. Silber's most recent book, "Gender and the Sectional Conflict" (2009) consists of three lectures that she delivered at Penn State as part of the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era. In the book, Silber examines how North and South viewed masculinity and femininity and how their respective views impacted their conduct of the Civil War and its aftermath.
In the first lecture, "Gender and the 'Cause' in the U.S. Civil War, Union and Confederate" Silber begins with a question that has been explored by others: what prompted individuals, North and South, to the possible sacrifice of their lives in the Civil War? She argues that in some important respects the sections responded to this question differently and that the difference implicated gender issues. People in the South believed that they were fighting for home and hearth. The South at the outset of the War lacked the sophisticated commercial development found in the North. Thus fighting to protect women -- wives, mothers, sisters -- was at the core of the Confederacy war effort, Silber argues. She claims that the South never developed a true sense of nationalism, and that the war was waged to protect what was dear to individuals.
Fighting to protect women and womanhood was critical to the North as well, Silber realizes. But she finds that fighting for wife and mother took a secondary place in the North to fighting for a cause that was deemed broader -- keeping the United States together and protecting liberty. When the North invaded the South destroying soldiers and homes, much of the reason for the South's fight was lost. In the North, gender issues became subordinated to questions of the role of the Nation and the place of the government.
The second lecture "The Problem of Women's Patriotism: North and South" develops this theme in an examination of women's activities and attitudes during the War. In both North and South, women assisted the war effort in many and similar ways, in the sanitary commissions, as nurses, tending to children and to property, offering aid and comfort, and many other things. But Silber is looking to understand how the sections saw gender and patriotism. Because of the local, personal character of the War in the Confederacy, Silber argues, patriotism for Southern women consisted primarily of loyalty to their men rather than to a broader cause. In the North, with gender subordinated to other aims, Northern women became more independent of their men in how they expressed patriotism. In the middle of the war, the patriotism of Northern women was sometimes questioned because they partook of the economic abundance in the North, in great contrast to the difficult circumstances in the South, during the War. Women came to express their patriotism in the North through a response to the ideas that motivated the conflict -- union and liberty for example -- rather than through dependence on their men. Thus patriotism became an individual rather than a familial matter and it included ideas of personal accountablility for both women and men that were brought to bear on the South when women were required to take loyalty oaths at various points near and following the conclusion of the conflict. Silber makes use of a famous statue, "Taking the Oath and Drawing Rations" by John Rogers (reproduced at page 62) which was revered in both North and South to make her point about the growth of personal autonomy and responsibility for women of both the North and the South following the Civil War.
In the final lecture, "Union and Confederate Women and the Memory of the Civil War" Silber claims that the Southern woman became emblematic of commemoration of the Civil War in the South and to some degree in the North as well but that the Northern woman did not attain this stature. Silber tries to understand why this was the case. Silber writes that in general "Civil War memory was shaped, to a great extent by ideas about gender, especially in the way northerners adopted a view of the South that highlighted its feminine and domestic virtues and even singled out southern white women as the objects of post war reconciliation." (preface at xviii). Silber examines the role of southern women in commemorative activities after the war. In the North, the Federal government undertook many of the commemorative activities, such as retrieving and burying the Union dead, and constructing monumenation, that in the South were undertaken by organizations of women. Further, expanding on the points that Silber made in the earlier lectures, Northern women's activities in the war tended to be motivated by causes and ideas rather than by home and hearth. Following the Civil War, northern women continued to be come politically active in a broad range of areas and left Civil War commemoration largely to the side. Thus, Silber, believes, their activities during the Civil War tended to become underestimated, as compared to the activities of women in the South. Silber concludes her book with a hope that the activities of northern women during the war will receive their due recognition.
This is a difficult, challenging book in both the Civil War and in gender studies. It was a somewhat unusual book for me and I think will be so for many others who study the War. While this type of study is unlikely to become my usual reading, I learned and was challenged from it. The book enhanced my understanding of the Civil War and of the Civil War Era.
Robin Friedman
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