Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints ed. by Judith Giesberg, Randall M. Miller (review)

Scarlett O’Hara opens the first essay of this new collection with a “Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war; this war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream” (3). Boredom will be the last thing on anyone’s mind after they finish this strong new collection of essays on women and the American Civil War, edited by historians Judith Giesberg and Randall Miller. This sixteen-essay volume pairs essays on the North and the South to establish “a running comparative dynamic throughout the book,” attempting to circumvent the field’s regional segregation, in which “historians writing about Southern women rarely comment on or interact with those working on the North, and vice versa” (xi). The result is a dynamic collection that encourages readers to consider and compare a variety of themes, as well as research methodologies, across regional boundaries.

Women and the American Civil War is well suited as an assessment of where the field of Civil War women’s history presently stands and where it is headed. The collection covers eight main topics: politics, wartime mobilization, emancipation, wartime relief, women and families, religion, Reconstruction, and Civil War memory. It is a work that could easily appear in a Civil War undergraduate course to spark a varied and lively discussion, as well as on the bookshelf of any graduate student or established scholar.

Conversations between scholars extend beyond the paired essays in productive and interesting ways. In the politics section, Elizabeth R. Varon reminds historians of “the high stakes involved in how we as historians define politics: if we define politics broadly, to include not only electoral contests but a variety of battles for social authority, we bring into focus not only the stunning range of women’s public activism, but also their private agonies and triumphs” (19). In the emancipation section, Rebecca Capobianco echoes this sentiment when she writes, “Historians must look beyond high politics to see how individuals pushed ahead of and against federal policies, carving out an emancipation that was meaningful to them” (95). These cross-sectional connections, across theme and across geographic distinction, remind scholars of the value in reading broadly.

The nuanced treatment of women as individuals within these larger categories is also refreshing. Nicole Etcheson’s essay on family is one example; she explores how age and life stage “dictated different roles for women at different points in their lives” (206). Instead of broad statements about what Union women did or did not do, the essay is filled with toddlers who missed soldiering fathers, sisters who found solace in religion, and sweethearts who warned fiancés of lovely southern belles. Etcheson writes of emotional distance between some sons and mothers alongside the story of a mother who attempted suicide after she believed her son had died. “O Weaver hug me up closely to you & let me kiss you a thousand times ten thousand,” begged one wife, while another would face the “few lapses” her husband confessed to while away (199, 200). The loss of a father, or brother, or husband, or son brought “varying degrees of hardship and anxiety” (206). This essay, like many in this collection, allows women individuality in experience.

As the editors acknowledge in their preface, this book is exploratory, not definitive, which makes it all the more exciting. Multiple authors explicitly point to areas for future research. Stacey M. Robertson writes, “We need large-scale analyses of diaries and letters; microhistories of contentious moments; biographies of politically active women; and metahistories postulating about how women’s political interventions have changed over time” (35). Elizabeth Parish Smith argues that “diverse women of the South drove Reconstruction and resistance to it in complex, even contradictory, ways that historians should continue to scrutinize” (274). Others offer their ideas as well, making this book a must...