Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War. By Mary Elizabeth Massey. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Pp. xxi, 371, xiii. $7.95.) Miss Massey undertook a formidable task in her study of the effect of the Civil War on American women. The mass of published and manuscript materials relating to nineteenth-century American women would have discouraged a less doughty historian. The book is one of the fourteen projected volumes in the Impact of the Civil War series planned by the Civil War Centennial Commission. It follows the guidelines as to format, footnote and bibliography form evidently laid down by the editors of the series and exhibited earlier in Paul W. Gates's Agriculture and the Civil War. The initial chapter summarizes the changing status of women in the several decades before the Civil War and concludes that by 1860 there was still lacking a catalyst to speed the emergence of women into great new responsibilities—a catalyst which the war was to provide. In two of the chapters, the second and fifteenth, Miss Massey describes the reaction of northern and southern women to the outbreak of hostilities and to the end of the war. In the former she recounts the enthusiasm, the fears, the groping for ways to serve through stimulation of enlistment, fund-raising, soldiers' aid societies, or individual charity. And in the latter she compares and contrasts the response, North and South, to war's end and to the problems that peace brought. For the most part the rest of the book is, in essence, a collection of separate essays, each covering an area into which the war rechanneled women's energies or accelerated progress earlier begun. The areas of activities include nursing, teaching, literary pursuits, reform, and industry. Each essay concludes with a paragraph or so reviewing the degree to which the Civil War experience affected future development. As a rule, Miss Massey follows in her conclusions Clara Barton's thesis that the Civil War projected the American woman ahead by at least fifty years in advance of the "normal position which continued peace . . . would have assigned her." Miss Massey finds one exception to this generalization in nursing. These studies of professional or vocational opportunities enhanced by war-time changes are interspersed at random with chapters on topics peculiarly related to the more temporary involvement of women in mihtary life. "Teeming with Women" describes those women who, for various 183 184CIVIL WAR HISTORY motives, attached themselves to mihtary encampments and includes those who disguised themselves to enlist as soldiers. "Risked Everything" is an interesting account of the women who participated in espionage. Other chapters review the domestic responsibilities and hardships with which women on both sides were forced to cope and the challenges facing those whose lives and fortunes felt the direct thrust of invasion. In her last chapter, Miss Massey sums up late nineteenth-century gains for women in civil service, industry, education, nursing, lecturing, and in other fields. It is an important chapter in that it apparently represents Miss Massey's effort to offset the absence of continuity in the book and in that it carries women's accomplishments down through the 1890's, in fulfillment of the purpose of the series, The Impact of the Civil War. It is, however, by no means the most interesting or the best organized of the sixteen chapters in Bonnet Brigades. One feels that Miss Massey's interest is beginning to flag and that the pressure of drawing conclusions within the framework of the impact of the Civil War is proving a bit wearisome. Certainly it does seem bold to ascribe to the Civil War a leap forward by fifty years for women, particularly in view of the economic developments before, during, and after the war which were to sweep women along, Civil War or no. Miss Massey's study is so thoroughly professional, as always, that it may be carping to mention that she was inclined to remain on the beaten path of repositories, researching in the National Archives, Library of Congress , Huntington Library, University of North Carolina, Duke University, and Smith College, to the exclusion of many states' collections of manuscript...