Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front by Judith Giesberg (review)

BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2013 87 Army at Home Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front Judith Giesberg The Civil War affected the entire population of the United States. Beyond the battlefields , the impact of the war reshaped the homes and lives of civilians. Northern women experienced the violence and pain of the war firsthand , and in response they became politically involved and crossed traditional gender barriers in the process. In Army at Home: Women and the CivilWar on the Northern Front, Judith Giesberg argues that “women redrew the lines that separated home from war and mapped an alternate wartime geography dictated by the material conditions of war rather than the ideological constraints of gender or the limitations of the middle -class imagination” (10). Giesberg explores the wartime struggles of northern working class, rural, African American, and immigrant women. She describes the situations of women in the northern states as they navigated wartime terrors and struggles in the absence of male family members. But, Giesberg asserts, even as the war presented hardships for northern women it also offered them previously unavailable economic and political opportunities. Giesberg examines the experiences of women in different situations, from rural women who took over their family farms to African American women who staged civil rights protests on streetcars . Throughout her study, Giesberg argues that northern women acclimated and changed in response to the challenges of the war, though some women enacted change while others adapted to wartime conditions. The first chapter focuses on women in rural settings who maintained their families and farms when their husbands and male family members enlisted. Rural women kept their family farms running by assuming new duties even as they struggled to maintain a balance in their lives. The demand of constant work left many women overwhelmed and looking for state and federal aid when they could obtain it. Other northern families suffered displacement when the men in their families enlisted. These women and families sought almshouses and relief offices to obtain aid for themselves and their children. Some displaced women flocked to the cities in search of work in munitions factories, but they met strong resistance from the men who remained in the workforce. Judith Giesberg. Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 248 pp. ISBN: 9780807872635 (paper), $24.95. BOOK REVIEWS 88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Giesberg also describes the experiences of African American women who conducted civil rights protests during the war. The Civil War offered new opportunities for black women and men to push for greater inclusion in American society. African American women, for example, worked to integrate streetcars in California. The movement slowly spread eastward, though it had only limited success in the face of continuing white racism. Giesberg also documents the efforts of northern working class women to enter politics . Many of these women left their homes to retrieve the bodies of dead family members or to help wounded men return home. After the war, many northern women searched for their loved ones, dead or alive. Some women used their grief as a means to bring attention to the nation’s apparent lack of gratitude for the sacrifice made by their men to defend and protect the Union. Giesberg concludes that “women’s Civil War” is the story “of the adjustments, large and small, women made to a war they had not been asked to fight but joined nonetheless” (177). She does an exemplary job using available sources to give voice to women previously overlooked and she offers insight into a world historians are only beginning to uncover. Giesberg focuses on the struggles and work of women who persevered through the war, but she also scrutinizes the opportunities the war gave women to transcend traditional gender roles and become involved in politics and the public sphere. But those wartime opportunities came only at the cost of great hardship. M. Alexandra Covington University of Louisville Union Heartland The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, eds. Historians of the Civil War have seen the North as monolithic for far too long. In the...