Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War - Softcover

Silber, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674060482 ISBN 13: 9780674060487

Verlag: Harvard University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Unusual book

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Críticas:

In this provocative, challenging work, Silber writes ordinary women onto the page and reshapes the boundaries of Civil War history. Her attention to the presence of Northern black women is particularly noteworthy. Publishers Weekly 20050425 Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War is an innovative analysis that is sure to inspire a reconsideration of northern women's patriotism and its long-term results. Silber's analytical strengths and narrative style make this an engaging study for students and scholars of both women's and Civil War history. -- Victoria E. Ott Journal of Southern History Nina Silber uses [an] ordinary woman's appeal to the president to reveal the complexities of Northern women's relationships with the nation-state during the Civil War...In this concise and accessible work, Silber argues that the Civil War brought Northern women into a more public relationship with the federal government, but that this relationship was framed in terms of their subordination to it. Using women's diaries and letters, she discusses how such changes affected Northern women and their understandings of women's civic and political responsibilities. While many historians see the Civil War as prodding Northern women to increased autonomy and feminist political action, Silber demonstrates that the war's impact on women was more complicated than that. The war brought neither complete liberation nor complete oppression for women, but a bit of both...There are important lessons here for scholars in many fields, as Silber shows how women's experiences in wartime both reveal and affect social, cultural, and political events. -- Kara Dixon Vuic Journal of Military History 20061001 This important book fills a significant gap in existing scholarship on women and the Civil War. By focusing on northern women in general, rather than on the minority who left home to engage in war work, it reveals that paying attention to women--even those who did not play a large role in organized war work--changes our understanding of the legacy of the Civil War itself. -- Barbara Cutter Annals of Iowa 20061201 Daughters of the Union is an important tome in the canon of Civil War women's studies...Dr. Silber brings a fresh perspective to the active participation of Northern women during the war. Her thesis is well documented and should be required reading in Civil War history programs and political science curriculum, in addition to women's studies programs. -- Janet Leigh Bucklew H-Net Online 20061011

Reseña del editor:

Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives. Nina Silber traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship among the women left behind by Union soldiers. She offers a complex account, bolstered by women's own words from diaries and letters, of the changes in activity and attitude wrought by the war. Women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort. But even as their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies. Silber's arresting tale fills an important gap in women's history. She shows the women of the North--many for the first time--discovering their patriotism as well as their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, even as they encountered the obstacles of wartime rule. The Civil War required many women to act with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. It brought women more firmly into the civic sphere and ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Harvard University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0674060482
• ISBN 13: 9780674060487
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352