Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (review)

In June 1864, Catherine Speilman wrote to President Abraham Lincoln as "'a pore widder wumman whose husband fote in your army'" to ask for his assistance in finding her "'a plaice in one of your hospittles'" (p. 86). In her study of women like Speilman, Nina Silber uses this ordinary woman's appeal to the president to reveal the complexities of Northern women's relationships with the nation-state during the Civil War. Speilman, after all, had written directly to the President, but based her appeal on her husband's wartime service.

In this concise and accessible work, Silber argues that the Civil War brought Northern women into a more public relationship with the federal government, but that this relationship was framed in terms of their subordination to it. Using women's diaries and letters, she discusses how such changes affected Northern women and their understandings of women's civic and political responsibilities. While many historians see the Civil War as prodding Northern women to increased autonomy and feminist political action, Silber demonstrates that the war's impact on women was more complicated than that. The war brought neither complete liberation nor complete oppression for women, but a bit of both.

The Civil War brought questions of women's patriotism and loyalty into the public arena. For most Northern women, the primary way they demonstrated allegiance to the Union was through their connections to men. By sacrificing their husbands, sons, brothers, or sweethearts to the war effort, women publicly aligned themselves with the war and envisioned themselves as part of the greater national cause of preserving the Union. As they managed their homes and ran businesses, worked in factories and mills, volunteered for relief work, worked with freedmen in the South, and served as nurses in the Union Army, many women felt empowered by their newfound skills, knowledge, and independence. They became more politically conscious and felt they had earned the right to express their beliefs. At the same time, however, the women's experiences revealed the contemporary limitations placed upon their sex and the ways women's subordination shaped their civic engagement. Women oftentimes found themselves dependent on men to guide them through the unfamiliar economic, bureaucratic, and military worlds. They found all aspects of their appearance and behavior, especially their sexuality, closely monitored by other women, men, and public officials who saw sexual fidelity as an indicator of women's patriotism. And, they found themselves dependent on male politicians and the federal government to effect real change on their behalf.

The war brought, as Silber effectively demonstrates, both progress and stagnation to Northern women and their relationship with the nation. She devotes considerable attention to showing how issues of class further affected the experiences and ideas of Northern women seeking to prove their patriotism. And while Silber does discuss women's views of emancipation and suffrage for African American men, my only wish is that the author had extended her discussion of race to explore how notions of race were tied, for both white and black women, to notions of womanhood and citizenship. There are important lessons here for scholars in many fields, as Silber shows how women's experiences in wartime both reveal and affect social, cultural, and political events.