America's Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change, 1850-1890 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS363 zeal are evident throughout her writing. Hawks is a keen observer of her surroundings and often critical of the actions of fellow Union supporters in the war zone. The least satisfying aspect of the book is endemic to primary material such as this. Hawks raises as many questions about herself and her life as she answers. Much more is learned in the foreword about her eccentric husband, Milton, and their marital relationship than in the journal itself. She recounts separations from friends such as James C. Beecher with more detail and sadness than her partings from her spouse. Esther is aware that her gender alone kept her from many leadership positions and limited many choices. Not revealing her feelings about her secondary role in the federal service, she rarely comments on the treatment accorded her sex. When a "beardless young fellow" is given charge over her and her "resolute" female companions, and all the women "meakly followed his direction," Ester exclaims, "Oh, what a big thing it is to be born a man!" (33). Yet even this comment is ambiguous; did she intend humor or lament? Readers interested in the educational activities of Esther and her colleagues will be generally pleased with the work. Esther's descriptions of her schools, her pupils, and her fellow teachers, both white and black, are detailed and extensive. Those wanting to know more about wartime medicine, the work of physicians, and the conditions of hospitals will be less satisfied. Considering her earlier determination to receive a legitimate medical education, and her lengthy career as a physician after the war, this omission in the journal is more noticeable and unfortunate. Although there are many things about the personality, attitudes, and life of Esther Hawks that are never revealed in A Woman Doctor's Civil War, the work is of scholarly merit. It is informative about Union army noncombatant support personnel and is illuminating about the lives of both whites and blacks in the wartime South. The work is beneficial to women's history as it complements pioneering studies of women physicians by writers such as Regina Morantz-Sanchez and Mary Roth Walsh. The journal is a valuable and readable account of a woman who deserves historical note. Lybeth Hodges Texas Woman's University America's Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change, 1850-1890. By Milton Rugoff. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989. Pp. vii, 374. $24.95.) Attempting to find a middle way between a scholarly social history of the Gilded Age and a biography of a single individual, Milton Rugoff has written lively, short portraits of thirty-six men and women, whose 364CIVIL WAR HISTORY lives illustrate the dramatic changes in American values and standards that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period during which, according to Rugoff, the flexible creed of Henry Ward Beecher displaced the unyielding Puritanism of Cotton Mather. Progress was now measured in terms of goods and profits rather than the idealism of the Utopians and the Transcendentalists. According to Rugoff, the stock market crashes of 1929 and even 1987 were replays of the speculative frenzy and greed of the money lords which ended in Black Friday, 1869. In colorful, vigorous prose, Rugoff brings to life figures ranging from the well-known, such as Ulysses S. Grant, James G. Blaine, Mrs. William Astor, Joseph Pulitzer, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry George, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain to the comparatively forgotten, including the forty-eighter J. Goldsborough Bruff, who nearly died of fever and sarvation during a Sierra Nevada storm; Bethenia OwensAdair , the nation's first woman surgeon; Ann Lockwood, an attorney; and Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's rebellious nineteenth wife. Interesting and amusing though this collection is, however, it might also mislead the unwary reader because Rugoff emphasizes wherever possible the titillating, the tawdry, and the astonishing. The accomplishments of such "critics and cassandras" as George, Whitman, Twain, and Charles Eliot Norton are generally overwhelmed by the peccadilloes of such "violators of the great taboo" concerning sexual matters as Jim Fisk, Henry Ward Beecher, and Victoria Woodhull. Although Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller are briefly...