Gender and the Sectional Conflict (review)

In Gender and the Sectional Conflict, Nina Silber continues the recent trend in exploring the gender implications of the Civil War era. Silber, whose previous work (The Romance of Reunion [UNC Press, 1993], and Daughters of the Union [Harvard Univ. Press, 2005]) has examined the importance of gender to the Reconstruction period as well as the roles of Northern women during the war, takes a comparative approach in this succinct, yet insightful look at the ways in which notions of womanhood and manhood shaped the experiences of Confederates and Unionists before, during, and after the Civil War. As she effectively argues, gender notions regarding the causes and consequences of the war carried significant political implications for both civilians and soldiers. How Southerners and Northerners on the battlefield and the home front confronted issues of patriotism, power, and postwar memory was directly tied to their differing views on the ideological constructions they attached to appropriate gender roles.

For Northerners and Southerners, ideas about home and family were incorporated into how each side expressed their respective causes at the outbreak of the war. Confederates blended home and country into their cause, she argues, by defending a more intensely patriarchal society, whereby Confederates idealized womanhood by maintaining traditional ties to "male protection and female submission" (xvi). Unionists on the other hand exalted the nation-state, a view originating from the separate-spheres doctrine generated from the North's market economy. At the same time, Northerners did not tolerate political apathy from their wives and daughters. Instead, they expected their women to contribute both materially and ideologically to the Union cause. These views on Northern women reflected as well, Silber argues, the postwar aims of Unionists who saw the nation-state as contributing a larger role in providing for public assistance, education, and pensions for Union soldiers and families.

Wartime challenges further separated how Northerners and Southerners viewed women's patriotic duties. For Southern women, economic hardships and the carnage enacted from military battles in their own communities led many Northerners to assert that Confederate women displayed greater allegiance to the Confederate cause than did Northern women to the Union cause. While considering "class anxieties, Republican fears of growing Democratic influence, and women's more forthright expressions of their antiwar sentiments," Silber points out that Northern women were more routinely attacked by Unionists for their lack of material hardships (xvii). As a result, Northern men demanded that Union women base their political allegiances not in gender terms, but in concrete ideological principles. Such principles held significant sway in the postwar period as Northern women remembered the war as one waged by heroic male soldiers, while Confederate women assumed more prominent positions in postwar commemoration projects. Heading organizations assigned to building monuments, providing assistance for Confederate veterans, and burying their dead, Southern women helped rewrite the war by making it less about political and ideological motives, and focused instead on familial and regional obligations.

Gender and the Sectional Conflict is a valuable contribution to the role that gender played during the Civil War era as well as helping to bring a more comparative approach to Civil War home-front studies. Scholars interested in exploring, for example, the role of African American women in the North and the South, as well as those of free blacks and ex-slaves more generally within both regions, would benefit from Silber's insightful instruction. Although focusing solely on gender, Silber has succeeded in reiterating the important link between home front and battlefield and its comparative significance for how soldiers and civilians understood, participated in, and remembered the Civil War.