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  • Revisiting Mary Massey’s Bonnet Brigades
  • Nina Silber (bio)

In 1966, the same year a handful of women met in Washington, D.C., to found the National Organization of Women (NOW), Mary Elizabeth Massey published Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War. A lively, almost encyclopedic account documenting the many ways women (mostly white) in both sections were changed by the war, Bonnet Brigades, with its extended exploration of women’s wartime contributions, represented a rare intervention in Civil War scholarship, a field dominated, then and now, by works focused on the political and military activities of men.

Perhaps more than anything, Massey knew a good story when she saw it. Picking up my somewhat worn-out copy of her book, I see my pencil markings and underlined phrases, with highlights and queries about some of those stories. How to make sense, for example, of Massey’s remark that “women were also among the most bloodthirsty participants in the New York draft riots of 1863”? Why, too, was there so much anxiety about the sexual morals of the so-called government girls, the young women being employed in increasing numbers in various departments of both the Confederate and Federal governments? What did it mean that Ulysses S. Grant apparently said that renowned Union nurse Mary Ann Bickerdyke “outranks everybody, even Lincoln”?15 She didn’t really, did she? And why were so many of those female nurses referred to as “mother”? [End Page 406]

Not surprisingly, Massey was interested in change, although not in the way women might have changed the war, but in the way the war changed women. In this regard, and despite the wide variety in terms of women’s circumstances and experiences, she believed that the social and economic dislocations of the war inevitably brought women into a new relationship with the patriarchal culture of their respective regions. Massey tended to interpret the new relationship in the language of “emancipation,” identifying women who had “leaped from their spheres” or became “competitors for bread.”16 Contemporary scholarship has been decidedly less whiggish about women’s advancement, focusing instead on their displacement and marginalization and the new forms of patriarchal oppression to which they were subjected. Surely the new scholarship that documents the high rates of disease and mortality among African American women and children in contraband camps occupies a very different analytical space than Massey’s book.

Aside from her generally positive assessments of women’s leaps, Massey’s scholarship also tends to take official and elite sources at face value, especially when it comes to understanding poor and African American women. She sympathizes with white southern women, like the plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas, who “were more concerned than the men about Negro morality,” and so insisted that freed people go through the proper legal channels to seek divorces before remarrying. The notion that slavery gave virtually no standing to the marriage institution seems to factor very little into Massey’s analysis. Poor women who were prostitutes are likewise subjected to Massey’s simplified moral perspective. Some of these women, Massey writes, “brazenly claimed pensions, although they usually tried to conceal their real wartime activities.”17 Yet a so-called camp follower who had occasionally traded sex for money and then wrote on her pension form that she was a laundress may not have been concealing anything, but simply reflecting the opportunities available to poor women in the middle years of the nineteenth century.

This failure to closely question elite sources is one indication that Massey was not really interested in gender as an analytical category. This, of course, is not surprising for a book that predated the more theoretically based scholarship of the 1970s and ’80s. But it’s interesting to see how that lack of attention [End Page 407] affected Massey’s project. She considers, for example, all those women, North and South, who ventured into new territory—whether in wage-earning, stump-speaking, or cow-milking—and endows them with a spirit of adventure and determination. But the notion that women, and men, were affected by an ideology of domesticity, one that tended to condone or condemn certain types of “public” activities, does...

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