Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (review)

Judith Giesberg's engaging new book joins a growing subfield in Civil War history: studies of the northern home front, centering on the lives of women. Joining scholars like Jeannie Attie, Elizabeth Leonard, and Nina Silber, Giesberg offers a distinctly new vantage point. While other scholars have noted the work and difficulty faced by poor women during the war, Giesberg makes recovering the lives of African American, working-class and marginal women her central task. What she discovers is a series of adjustments women made, actively rather than passively, to a war not of their making, adjustments that showed no "unanimity of purpose" (163).

The book begins with the story of Lydia Bixby, the widow and mother to whom President Abraham Lincoln wrote his well-known condolence letter, upon hearing of the loss of her five soldier sons. As it turned out, Bixby may have only lost two or perhaps three sons to battle (the rest to discharge or desertion), but after a brief bloom of interest, she fell out of the public eye. It took some sleuthing for the author to find her headstone, marked simply 423, in the Mt. Hope Cemetery in Boston. Yet Bixby is a fitting beginning here: she is one of a number of women who not only suffered the costs of the war but asked for aid from her state government. She was poor, moved often, and was the main support of a number of children other than her five soldier sons, who might have provided for her and them. And Bixby, like countless others, moved in and out of private and public spaces, and left few records of a Civil War "no less extraordinary though they were more common" (7).

In subsequent chapters, Giesberg takes up the struggles of women largely left out of the deliberations for war. She explores the lives of rural women who took up the work of their farmer husbands and sons, speculating that very often the vaunted productivity of northern agriculture was a result not always of new machinery or added immigration but the labor of women. Analyzing the letters between husbands and wives, she makes sense of the many ways women struggled to address the crisis that the loss of their labor was to their families. This was not simply a welcome opportunity for added authority for women; "not particularly bound by urban bourgeois notions of domesticity," Giesberg notes, "Pennsylvania farm women did not likely welcome the war as an opportunity to transcend them" (23).

The northern home front, Giesberg argues, defied the expectation of an unchanging domestic geography, with a stalwart waiting woman's figure leaning in an imagined doorway. Instead, the war produced an "alternate wartime geography," a "dynamic process of remapping," as women struggled to make sense of new and changing realities (10). One of Giesberg's most fascinating chapters is the one that focuses on displacement, with women and their families a kind of moving target in this landscape. There she analyzes state records, decoding the letters desperate women wrote as a result of rumors of aid, seeking provisions for their families as well as shelter in almshouses. "The story of women's displacement," Giesberg argues, "highlights one of a number of wartime contests over space as women who left home to apply for outdoor relief or to demand shelter collided with officials attempting to keep order" (47).

Keeping order was at the center of the northern strategy for the home front, but it was thwarted by communities and individual women demanding a new kind of order, based on differing priorities and values. Working women in arsenals pushed for safer conditions—given the explosions that killed dozens—challenging the authority of arsenal commanders. African American women demanded the right to ride segregated streetcars in both San Francisco and Philadelphia; "choosing their bodies as sites of resistance," Giesberg notes, "women defied a...