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The University of North Carolina Press
144 pp., 51/2 x 81/2, 14 illus., notes, index
The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era
Gender and the Sectional Conflict
In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war.
Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory.
Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women--black and white--on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.
"An insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War."
--The Courier
"This insightful and thought-provoking volume is a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on gender and the Civil War."
--H-Net Reviews
"Nina Silber's essays offer a creative window onto the expanding world of nineteenth-century white womanhood and the intriguing challenges met by those who wrestled with issues of power, patriotism, and perspective during our nation's epic struggle, the American Civil War."
--Catherine Clinton, author of Mrs. Lincoln: A Life
"Nina Silber energetically and persuasively shows that when it comes to understanding the Civil War, gender is no fashionable academic abstraction. What Northerners and Southerners thought defined men as men and women as women shaped competing notions of patriotism, and profoundly influenced how Americans waged, endured, and remembered the war."
--Chandra Manning, author of What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
"Silber reminds us how crucial gender ideology was--not just to the women on the home front, but also to soldiers in the ranks and politicians in office. She is a deft and thought-provoking historian, and Gender and the Sectional Conflict adds tremendously to current intellectual debates."
--Lesley J. Gordon, University of Akron
Cloth: $24.95
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