Gender and the Sectional Conflict (review)

This slim volume offers a compelling synthesis of new and old scholarship on the meaning of the Civil War in terms of gender. A series of lectures at Penn State, these have the benefits of the lecture-format: lucid, compressed, and lyrical. What's more, Silber has now written two important books on this topic, and read a great deal more, and that knowledge-base well informs this exploration of a number of crucial comparative questions about cultural imperatives North and South.

Each chapter considers a central question. The first, and longest, chapter juxtaposes the expressed ideological justifications that Southerners and Northerners offered for engaging in combat: Did Northerners and Southerners fight using the same (gendered) reasons? Confederates, Silber finds, "blended the causes of home and country and implied that while the nation may have been a cause worth fighting for, it meant nothing in the absence of homes and families" (p. xiv). Unionists, by contrast, tended to "diferentiate between the family's 'present' welfare and 'future' happiness, pledging themselves to fight more for the latter than the former" (p. xiv). These distinctions "became critical parts of the ideological frameworks adhered to by northerners and southerners" (p. xv).

A second chapter explores a mid-war conversation about the respective patriotic attachments expressed by southern and northern women: Were Union women as patriotic as Confederate women? By 1863, Silber found, many writers expressed concern about the depth and vigor of northern women's patriotism, juxtaposing it to an ostensibly more public and sharper response by Confederate women. These worries, Silber believes, had to do in part with the differing roles southern and northern women played in the ideological justifications for War, and in part related to the respective geographic realities of a War fought mainly on southern soil. Still, she finds, targeting women in the North was a way to talk about other worrisome but more delicate issues: class (Was the elite benefiting unduly? Would the working-class keep sacrificing so dearly?) and rising antiwar sentiment (women were less vulnerable to being targeted as traitors or draft resisters, and so might have taken a larger role in articulating the Democratic position) among them. Perhaps as a result of this public criticism, Silber argues, northern women began to hold themselves to "a new standard of patriotism," "making their political and ideological utterances their own, through their words and their actions and through a new level of political accountability" (p. 58).

The third chapter considers the legacy of the War, and takes up the important and rich new scholarship on memory. How did northern and southern women participate in postwar memorial activities, and how did they—or didn't they— become "the objects of postwar remembering?" (p. 70). Here the bedrock ideological differences between North and South, articulated in chapter one, created a significant divergence, one with lasting impact on the War's memory. While Northern women—white and black, sometimes in integrated groupings—certainly participated in postwar memorial activities, they did not appear nearly as often in postwar reminiscences, fiction, or cinema. In addition, "for every three Confederate soldiers' monuments that included tributes to women, only one Union monument did the same" (p. 71). Silber offers a number of explanations, beginning with the clear imperative, from the vantage point of the Lost Cause, to describe the Confederate commitment as "moral, virtuous, and righteous," one that consistently made women and families central (p. 75). Postwar activities in the north, over time, took up other issues, including aid to the poor, and "disseminating a patriotic commitment to the United States" to increasing numbers of foreign newcomers in northern cities (p. 93).

The benefits of synthesis are many: Silber here offers a way to see important works of scholarship, on the north and south, in relationship with each other, to tease out differences in Union and Confederate priorities; and to relate intellectual and military history, cultural and social history, all through the distinctive prism of gender...