Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley, J. L. Anderson (review)

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 past decade, scholars have started to challenge that view and “many Norths” are beginning to complicate the traditional narrative. The essay collection Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War stands squarely on the cutting edge of putting the Civil War in the context of regional history . In his forward, William C. Davis rightly argues that these essays break new ground and that they represent only a beginning rather than the last word on the subject. Several topics unite the volume, especially gender, agriculture, and political division and dissent, as the book extends and challenges existing interpretations of the northern home front. Michael P. Gray presents a fascinating essay about Lake Erie excursions to visit the Civil War prison on Johnson’s Island. The “captivating captives” became a tourist attraction, as Ohioans took boat trips to stare at the imprisoned Confederate officers. Gender mixed with class as some Buckeye women lingered near the fence to gape at naked southern gentlemen bathing and masculinity mingled with honor as the visitors tried to shame the prisoners who defiantly flew flags that defended their cause and insulted the Yankee gawkers. Julie A. Mujic continues the gendered approach with BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2013 89 her look at Michigan University. Unlike other schools that closed or barely survived, Michigan actually grew during the war years. The students redefined patriotism by making the questionable claim that continuing their education was actually harder than enlisting in the army to save the Union. Education, then, became an assertion of loyalty to the cause and a mark of manhood. Masculinity also meant confronting those who opposed the war, including the nearly one-quarter of the student body who could be labeled “Copperheads.” Politics divided, even in the isolated safety of the upper Midwest. Directly confronting the notion that the war liberated women by thrusting them into new roles that allowed them to gain independence, Nicole Etcheson argues that some soldiers’ wives in Indiana often remained under patriarchal authority. Absent husbands asserted their masculine power by requiring their wives to live with their families while they served in the military . Living with in-laws kept women under the control of their husbands, as the man’s parents and siblings and other relatives worked to maintain her proper role. Ginette Aley shows how wartime life in the agrarian Midwest differed from eastern communities. Women took on the...