Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War

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Description

Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on one of the most most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were continuously caught in the middle of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives.

Nina Silber traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship some of the women left at the back of by Union soldiers. She offers a complex account, bolstered by women’s own words from diaries and letters, of the changes in activity and attitude wrought by the war. Women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort. But while their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies.

Silber’s arresting tale fills a very powerful gap in women’s history. She shows the women of the North–many for the first time–discovering their patriotism in addition to their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, while they encountered the obstacles of wartime rule. The Civil War required many women to act with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. It brought women more firmly into the civic sphere and in the long run gave them new public roles, which would prove an important starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.

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