Gender and the Sectional Conflict

Gender and the Sectional Conflict PDF Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469625768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war. Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory. Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women--black and white--on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.

Gender and the Sectional Conflict

Gender and the Sectional Conflict PDF Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469625768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war. Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory. Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women--black and white--on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.

Sex and the Civil War

Sex and the Civil War PDF Author: Judith Giesberg
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and reproduction—most evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

Bleeding Borders

Bleeding Borders PDF Author: Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In Bleeding Borders, Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel offers a fresh, multifaceted interpretation of the quintessential sectional conflict in pre--Civil War Kansas. Instead of focusing on the white, male politicians and settlers who vied for control of the Kansas territorial legislature, Oertel explores the crucial roles Native Americans, African Americans, and white women played in the literal and rhetorical battle between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the region. She brings attention to the local debates and the diverse peoples who participated in them during that contentious period. Oertel begins by detailing the settlement of eastern Kansas by emigrant Indian tribes and explores their interaction with the growing number of white settlers in the region. She analyzes the attempts by southerners to plant slavery in Kansas and the ultimately successful resistance of slaves and abolitionists. Oertel then considers how crude frontier living conditions, Indian conflict, political upheaval, and sectional violence reshaped traditional Victorian gender roles in Kansas and explores women's participation in the political and physical conflicts between proslavery and antislavery settlers. Oertel goes on to examine northern and southern definitions of "true manhood" and how competing ideas of masculinity infused political and sectional tensions. She concludes with an analysis of miscegenation -- not only how racial mixing between Indians, slaves, and whites influenced events in territorial Kansas, but more importantly, how the fear of miscegenation fueled both proslavery and antislavery arguments about the need for civil war. As Oertel demonstrates, the players in Bleeding Kansas used weapons other than their Sharpes rifles and Bowie knives to wage war over the extension of slavery: they attacked each other's cultural values and struggled to assert their own political wills. They jealously guarded ideals of manhood, womanhood, and whiteness even as the presence of Indians and blacks and the debate over slavery raised serious questions about the efficacy of these principles. Oertel argues that, ultimately, many Native Americans, blacks, and women shaped the political and cultural terrain in ways that ensured the destruction of slavery, but they, along with their white male counterparts, failed to defeat the resilient power of white supremacy. Moving beyond a conventional political history of Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Borders breaks new ground by revealing how the struggles of this highly diverse region contributed to the national move toward disunion and how the ideologies that governed race and gender relations were challenged as North, South, and West converged on the border between slavery and freedom.

Bonnet Brigades

Bonnet Brigades PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Massey
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Appraises the roles and direct involvement of American women on the society and economy of the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War period.

Gender, War, and World Order

Gender, War, and World Order PDF Author: Richard C. Eichenberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173816X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries, Gender, War, and World Order offers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings. Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework, Gender, War, and World Order compares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.

Divided Houses

Divided Houses PDF Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195080343
Category : Sex role
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Divided Houses is the first book to show how the Civil War transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among Americans. This unique volume brings together a wide spectrum of critical viewpoints by newly emerging scholars as well as distinguished authors in the field to show how gender became a prism through which the political tensions of antebellum America were filtered and focused. Through the course of the book, many fascinating subjects are explored, from new "manly" responsibilities both black and white men had thrust upon them as soldiers, to women's roles in the guerrilla fighting, to the wartime dialogue on interracial sex. In addition, an incisive introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson helps place these various subjects within an overall historical context. Divided House sheds new light on the entire Civil War experience, demonstrating how themes of gender, class, race, and sexuality interacted to forge the beginnings of a new society.

Men's Gender Role Conflict

Men's Gender Role Conflict PDF Author: James M. O'Neil
Publisher: Amer Psychological Assn
ISBN: 9781433818189
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Men's gender role conflict is a psychological state in which restrictive definitions of masculinity limit men's well-being and human potential. Gender role conflict (GRC) doesn't just harm boys and men, but also girls and women, transgendered people, and society at large. Extensive research relates men's GRC to myriad behavioral problems, including sexism, violence, homophobia, depression, substance abuse, and relationship issues. This book represents a call to action for researchers and practitioners, graduate students, and other mental healthcare professionals to confront men's GRC and reduce its harmful influence on individuals and society. James O'Neil is a pioneer in men's psychology who conceptualized GRC and created the Gender Role Conflict Scale. In this book, he combines numerous studies from renowned scholars in men's psychology with more than 30 years of his own clinical and research experience to promote activism and challenge the status quo. He describes multiple effects of men's GRC, including success, power, and competition issues restricted emotionality restricted affectionate behavior between men conflicts between men's work and family relations. O'Neil also explains when GRC can develop in a man's gender role journey, how to address it through preventative programs and therapy for boys and men, and what initiatives researchers and clinicians can pursue.

Southern Manhood

Southern Manhood PDF Author: Craig Thompson Friend
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820324234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn’t own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field in new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

Tales from the Haunted South

Tales from the Haunted South PDF Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

The Romance of Reunion

The Romance of Reunion PDF Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080786448X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, and one that served to reinforce Victorian values as well as northern hegemony, was the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman. Southern men also were represented as affirming traditional gender roles. As northern men wrestled with their nation's increasingly global and aggressive foreign policy, the military virtues extolled in Confederate legend became more admired than reviled. By the 1890s, concludes Silber, northern whites had accepted not only a newly resplendent image of Dixie but also a sentimentalized view of postwar reunion.