Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War
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.

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Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War
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.

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Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War

Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War

by Nina Silber
Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War

Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War

by Nina Silber

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674060487
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 03/18/2011
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nina Silber is Professor of History at Boston University.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Summoned to War, Charged to Patriotism

1. Loyalties in Conflict

2. The Economic Battlefront

3. Domesticity under Siege

4. From Patriots to Partisans, and Back Again

5. Aiding the Cause, Serving the State

6. Saving the Sick, Healing the Nation

7. Wartime Emancipation

8. American Women and the Enduring Power of the State

Epilogue: An Ambiguous Legacy

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

What People are Saying About This

Northern women have remained a curiously neglected group in the massive literature on the Civil War. Nina Silber's study brings them to the fore, examining the myriad ways in which the conflict impinged on their lives and underscoring the complex legacy it bequeathed in terms of their relationship to the nation-state. Admirably researched, clearly written, and forcefully argued, this splendid book will appeal to anyone interested in how women of the North fit into the grand mosaic of our defining national trial.

James M. McPherson

Southern women both white and black became direct participants in a Civil War that in many cases swept over their homes and farms. While the same was not true for most Northern women, they too experienced unprecedented engagement with public affairs as they mobilized themselves to support the war. Nina Silber's excellent study of this engagement gives new and broader meaning to Lincoln's description of the Civil War as 'a People's contest'- all the people.
James M. McPherson, author of Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg

Drew Faust

We have all eagerly awaited this indispensable book. Nina Silber's engaging and definitive study presents a new side of the Civil War experience in the North and a new dimension of the history of American women.
Drew Faust, author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War

Eric Foner

Challenging prevalent misconceptions about women's role in the Civil War North, Nina Silber offers a fascinating account of how the war experience both opened new opportunities for female independence and tied women more and more closely to the needs of an activist state. An important addition to our understanding of the crisis of the Union.
Eric Foner, De Witt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University

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