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With Courage and Delicacy: Civil War on the Peninsula: Women and the U.S. Sanitary Commission (review)
- Civil War History
- The Kent State University Press
- Volume 46, Number 3, September 2000
- pp. 266-267
- 10.1353/cwh.2000.0075
- Review
- Additional Information
BOOK REVIEWS With Courage and Delicacy: Civil War on the Peninsula: Women and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. By Nancy Scripture Garrison. (Mason City, Iowa: Savas Publishing, 1999. Pp. ix, 242. $24.95.) The work of three of the many Northern women who served as nurses during the Civil War is detailed in Nancy Garrison's work on Katherine Wormeley, Georgeanna Woolsey, and Eliza Howland. All three served witii the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862 on the floating hospitals that provided care as directed by Frederick Law Olmsted and the USSC staff of volunteers. All three, according to Garrison, did so without much of a challenge tothe expectations ofthe nineteenthcentury regarding women's proper behavior. In fact, she argues, all three womenused the notions ofseparate spheres to justify their actions as nurses, defending their public activities by making reference to their God-given roles as caretakers for the injured and sick in their families and merely extending it to the wider world. Garrison's work is in many ways an expansion of Kristie Ross's work on these women in her article in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (1992). It provides a detailed look at the work of these women aboard the hospitals, as well as their family background, Olmsted's career and conflict in the USSC, and the remarkable stamina of all the parties concerned during the early years of the war prior to the medical reforms of the Army Medical Department that made civilian help less of an absolute necessity when providing medical care for the army in the field. This work provides useful information and detailed, at times lyrical, descriptions regarding those activities and not much else. Garrison seems quite put out at the failure of these women to follow up on their adventures by fighting for women's rights and the vote. Her exclusion of any of the theoretical literature and mostofthe women's history written about antebellum and CivilWar women means she fails to comprehend the degree to which suffrage for women was regarded with horror by most mid-nineteenth-century Americans. The literature regarding the extent to which the war meant sea changes in the lives of women is not apparent; neither is the literature that suggests there were numerous women of the elite classes in America who did as tiiey pleased with little reference to or regard for gender conventions; even her choice of literature regarding the medical history of the war is limited and completely neglects he BOOK REVIEWS267 work ofMary Gillette, who might have provided her with more accurate information regarding medical practices. The bibliography and notes are replete with errors ofform. Of the sixty-eight bibliographic entries (two works cited in footnotes do not appear at all), fully thirty-eight are incorrect. Footnote forms suffer the same fate. Pity the poor nineteenth-century women of the elite class in America. Garrison 's work does not advance a new argument regarding the meaning of these women's lives or their work and, in fact, is most unsettling, with her frequent complaints that these women did not do as they "should" and use their activities as a springboard from which to push for suffrage or other reforms. It is not only ahistorical, but also inappropriate to assume that values prized by feminists in the late twentieth century were prized by women in the mid-nineteenth century. These women did not see their actions as part of a reform impulse, true. But they served their country, nearly lost their health and their Uves, and retreated to the safety and support of gender conventions when the war ended for them. They also saved the Uves ofcountless soldiers and that really ought to be enough. Janet L. Coryell Western Michigan University Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. By Earl J. Hess. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. 263. $32.00.) This work is part of the University ofNebraska Press's Great Campaigns of the Civil War Series. The scope of the work is rather interesting. Hess picks up the story in the aftermath of Ulysses...