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  • Gender Equity and the Civil War
  • Lee Chambers-Schiller (bio)
Elizabeth D. Leonard. Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. New York: Norton, 1994. xxv 308 pp. Notes, select bibliography, and index. $23.00.
John F. Marszalek. The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861–1866. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. xxxiii 496 pp. Map, illustrations, and index. $16.95 (paper).

Recent studies of the Civil War have served to debunk persistent myths about women’s primary relation to the war as weeping widows, self-sacrificing wives, patriotic fiancees, and loyal daughters. Yet the degree to which wars represent milestones in women’s pursuit of social, economic, and political equality remains contested. The two works under consideration here reinforce our sense that North and South provided different experiences for white, middle- and upper-class women.

Elizabeth Leonard asks if the wartime work of northern women influenced popular perceptions of women’s abilities; if home front production contributed to the readiness of soldiers; if home front activities generated respect for women’s organizational talents or opened up new opportunities for women; and if participation reinforced self-reliance and self-esteem in women or stimulated their ambition. Looking at the front-line work of three unusual women — Annie Wittenmyer of Iowa, a charity worker who first turned her organizational skills to collecting and distributing troop supplies and then to establishing dietary kitchens to provide nutritious food for the wounded; Sophronia Bucklin, a New York nurse of Union soldiers; and Mary Evans Walker, a licensed doctor who adopted male dress and pursued an appointment as military surgeon — Leonard finds in the affirmative.

In contrast to Lori Ginzberg (Women and the Work of Benevolence, 1990), who saw the war as transforming the ideology of benevolence, Leonard finds that women’s war work drew heavily upon the antebellum ideology of women’s nature and sphere. Ginzberg believes that wartime benevolence heightened changes emerging in the 1850s by replacing the antebellum ideology of gender difference and female moral superiority with a new ideology of [End Page 612] gender similarity and a more masculine ethos of discipline and efficiency. Leonard asserts that white, middle-class, Yankee, charitable women appropriated the antebellum moral definition of womanhood and, in particular, woman’s unique moral responsibility for maintaining community and her natural selflessness and caretaking abilities, to expand the boundaries of woman’s proper place. So too, nurses and doctors, cooks and laundresses, “by virtue of their own determination and courage, brought forth positive changes in popular characterizations of middle-class womanhood that, in turn, opened new doors for women in the professions and in public life” (p. 200).

Perhaps the conflict between Ginzberg and Leonard is most clearly seen in their assessment of the themes of postwar histories of women’s wartime service. Leonard views these works as extolling women’s self-sacrifice and ability to cooperate with men, as downplaying women’s demands for professional status and pay, and as ignoring the scope of women’s administrative and organizational genius in an effort to redirect women back into voluntary benevolence. Ginzberg identifies these same works as praising the efficiency of the new centralized and national charitable organizations, women’s wage-earning capacity, and their subordination of feminine feeling and enthusiasm to business-like and war-like routinization and order. Ginzberg asserts that two sets of values — older notions of benevolence and new demands of public service — were at war in the North, a war that can be plotted through tensions about paying wages, centralizing corporate functions of benevolence, relating benevolence to government, and using funds for administrative — as opposed to strictly charitable — purposes. Her conclusion is that wartime masculinization of the ideology of benevolence pushed women further from both the symbolic and the real centers of power for social change and hastened in a class-based alliance for social welfare. Leonard, on the other hand, argues that many women resisted the efficiency and businesslike routinization of the United States Sanitary Commission and abhorred its centrally directed assessment of charitable needs in national terms. They continued to work independently and retained local control of the supplies they collected, channeling their war effort through the U.S. Christian...

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