Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (review)

Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition. By Judith Ann Giesberg. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. Pp. 239. $40.00.)

Giesberg's work is a welcome addition to the field of women and the Civil War, where the geographic focus remains on studies of the South. At first blush it seems understandable that the experience of Southern women, for whom the war was a more immediate force, might provide a more compelling narrative, but Giesberg has produced a well written and engaging work that not only redresses this regional imbalance but challenges existing scholarship on Northern women's wartime activism.

Women's historians have traditionally focused on two peak periods of female activism, the Second Great Awakening and the temperance crusades of the 1870s, viewing the interim period as an age of consolidation. Giesberg traces continuities between antebellum and postwar reform, arguing that the role of women in the United States Sanitary Commission provides the missing link between these two peaks. According to Giesberg, the war generation was part of a transitional political culture, when middle-class women crossed both geographic and class boundaries and created a long term female agenda that served as the groundwork for the mass women's movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Giesberg focuses on gender solidarity rather than class allegiance but successfully avoids the pitfalls of a romantic notion of sisterhood by setting women's wartime work within the larger political framework. Here she challenges Lori Ginzberg's argument that while the new wartime generation of female activists did indeed repudiate older styles of female benevolence, bonds of sisterhood were broken in the postwar period in favor of a conservative, class-based approach to benevolence. According to Ginzberg, this contributed not only to a masculinization of their work but also to the marginalization of women's leadership. Giesberg, on the other hand, argues that while these women thought of themselves as professionals and saw the benefits of aligning themselves with male leadership, they never lost sight of their own female agenda, nor were they averse to criticizing governmental agencies.

In fact Giesberg sees the work of women in the ussc as a shift in women's political culture rather than a clean break from the past. These women learned useful political skills and cooperated with men, while at the same time furthering their own interests. They studied the political process and learned how to address women's concerns in the public arena. This, argues Giesberg, was the genesis of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which did break away from male domination while seeking political alliances with male leaders whose agendas complemented their own.

Nor did women of the ussc accept peace as an end to their wartime roles. Many insisted that they had a continuing responsibility to the needs of veterans and their families. Giesberg argues that women leaders saw continued possibilities to link local activism with a national agenda. This mastery of "coalition" politics would serve women well in the wctu and the reform agendas of the Progressive era.

In an especially insightful chapter on women who served as nurses on union transport vessels, Giesberg illuminates a little-studied arena of war and simultaneously gives us a new view of female nurses. These women not only challenged the limits of domestic hierarchy, often leaving their husbands at home, but were also able to continue maternal care of wounded soldiers while at the same time criticizing the army's callous treatment of the wounded. Here Giesberg's work most successfully integrates the study of women's wartime roles into the larger framework of war. As the book stands, however, it will attract most attention from women's historians concerned with female activism and the continuing debate over the existence and viability of separate woman's culture. Those...