The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (review)

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872. By Lyde Cullen Sizer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 348. $45.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.)

For more than two decades, literary critics and historians have recovered the work of nineteenth-century women writers. Rather than focus on aesthetic attributes, much of this scholarship emphasizes "cultural work": the ways authors helped construct or subvert the social, cultural, and ideological systems of their day. As her title suggests, Lyde Cullen Sizer belongs to this school. She argues that women of the Civil War era used publication to participate in a political system that excluded them from explicit representation. Moreover, their writings engaged central and emerging divisions within Northern society, even as Union fought Confederacy.

Sizer places her nine central authors into three distinct groups. Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), all of a New England generation born before the War of 1812, grew up amid industrialization and social change. Fellow New Englanders Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps belonged to the next generation, after industry had become established and economic hierarchy had hardened. Non-New Englanders E. D. E. N. Southworth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Rebecca Harding Davis shared the others' commitment to the Union but wrote about the South and questioned a New England-centered vision of the North. These authors receive biographical introduction early on and reappear throughout the book. Other writers appear occasionally as contrasts and complements, enriching the picture of women's literary work in periodicals as well as books. Sizer discusses many sorts of works, ranging from novels, short stories, and poetry, to the memoirs of Sanitary Commission volunteers and nurses and the postwar histories of women's war deeds.

Sizer traces women writers' "cultural struggle" over race, class, and gender through several phases (4). In the 1850s, even as writers universalized "womanhood" in the terms of the white, Northern middle class, they also debated the nature of women's public activity, the appropriate response to slavery, and (by 1861, with Davis's Life in the Iron Mills) the industrial underside of free-labor ideology. A rhetoric of unity in the early war years briefly submerged these debates, but this consensus collapsed by 1863. Working women's wartime privations rendered hollow the middle-class language of shared feminine suffering. Many white, antislavery women writers suggested a post-emancipation America of shared economic opportunity but also social segregation. Although they portrayed the war as a step toward African American manhood, they depicted little comparable progress for formerly enslaved women. Instead, they highlighted a white women's war of opportunity and romance, enduring tragedy, and accomplishments. The years 1865-68 brought a revived rhetoric of middle-class unity and self-congratulation about white women's role in emancipation. At the same time, "nursing narratives became alternative histories" of the war, with "gritty realism and empowering sentimentalism" as well as "illuminating views on class conflict" (215). But these were stories of the past. By 1870 and afterwards, younger authors faced the future and the issues now called "the labor question," "the Negro question," and "the woman question." Phelps's novelistic treatment of class, Harper's poetry and her novel Iola Leroy about African American experience, and Alcott's stories of women all sought "to make change rather than to validate the status quo" (248).

Sizer's book joins a newly resurgent field of Civil War literary studies. In focusing on a select group of authors, Sizer does not address the questions of genre and publishing prominent in Alice Fahs's more comprehensive The Imagined Civil War (2000). Elizabeth Young's Disarming the Nation (1999) takes a literary-critical approach to a more limited set of women's writings. Sizer asks political questions instead: How did women...