Northern Women in the Aftermath of the Civil War

Northern Women in the Aftermath of the Civil War PDF Author: Joanne Rajoppi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781939995186
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The story of the women of one New Jersey family as they overcame tragedy and navigated the social, political, and economic complexities of post-Civil War America. Using the experiences of the Hamilton women, she explores the challenges and struggles that defined the roles of American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Northern Women in the Aftermath of the Civil War

Northern Women in the Aftermath of the Civil War PDF Author: Joanne Rajoppi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781939995186
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The story of the women of one New Jersey family as they overcame tragedy and navigated the social, political, and economic complexities of post-Civil War America. Using the experiences of the Hamilton women, she explores the challenges and struggles that defined the roles of American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 PDF Author: Lyde Cullen Sizer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This volume explores the lives and works of nine Northern women who wrote during the Civil War period, examining the ways in which, through their writing, they engaged in the national debates of the time. Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery, republicanism, heroism, and death. Among the authors discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Although direct political or partisan power was denied to women, these writers actively participated in discussions of national issues through their sentimental novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and letters to the editor. Sizer pays close attention to how these mostly middle-class women attempted to create a "rhetoric of unity," giving common purpose to women despite differences in class, race, and politics. This theme of unity was ultimately deployed to establish a white middle-class standard of womanhood, meant to exclude as well as include.

Daughters of the Union

Daughters of the Union PDF Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst 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 among the women left behind 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 even as their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies. Silber's arresting tale fills an important gap in women's history. She shows the women of the North--many for the first time--discovering their patriotism as well as their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, even as 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 ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.

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.

Patriotic Toil

Patriotic Toil PDF Author: Jeanie Attie
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801422249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
During the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission attempted to replace female charity networks and traditions of voluntarism with a centralized organization that would ensure women's support for the war effort served an elite, liberal vision of nationhood. Coming after years of debate over women's place in the democracy and status as citizens, soldier relief work offered women an occasion to demonstrate their patriotism and their rights to inclusion in the body politic. Exploring the economic and ideological conflicts that surrounded women's unpaid labors on behalf of the Union army, Jeanie Attie reveals the impact of the Civil War on the gender structure of nineteenth-century America. She illuminates how the war became a testing ground for the gendering of political rights and the ideological separation of men's and women's domains of work and influence. Attie draws on letters by hundreds of women in which they reflect on their political awakenings at the war's outbreak and their increasing skepticism of national policies as the conflict dragged on. Her book integrates the Civil War into the history of American gender relations and the development of feminism, providing a nuanced analysis of the relationship among gender construction, class development, and state formation in nineteenth-century America.

Ends of War

Ends of War PDF Author: Caroline E. Janney
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The Army of Northern Virginia’s chaotic dispersal began even before Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Court House. As the Confederates had pushed west at a relentless pace for nearly a week, thousands of wounded and exhausted men fell out of the ranks. When word spread that Lee planned to surrender, most remaining troops stacked their arms and accepted paroles allowing them to return home, even as they lamented the loss of their country and cause. But others broke south and west, hoping to continue the fight. Fearing a guerrilla war, Grant extended the generous Appomattox terms to every rebel who would surrender himself. Provost marshals fanned out across Virginia and beyond, seeking nearly 18,000 of Lee’s men who had yet to surrender. But the shock of Lincoln’s assassination led Northern authorities to see threats of new rebellion in every rail depot and harbor where Confederates gathered for transport, even among those already paroled. While Federal troops struggled to keep order and sustain a fragile peace, their newly surrendered adversaries seethed with anger and confusion at the sight of Union troops occupying their towns and former slaves celebrating freedom. In this dramatic new history of the weeks and months after Appomattox, Caroline E. Janney reveals that Lee’s surrender was less an ending than the start of an interregnum marked by military and political uncertainty, legal and logistical confusion, and continued outbursts of violence. Janney takes readers from the deliberations of government and military authorities to the ground-level experiences of common soldiers. Ultimately, what unfolds is the messy birth narrative of the Lost Cause, laying the groundwork for the defiant resilience of rebellion in the years that followed.

A Companion to American Women's History

A Companion to American Women's History PDF Author: Nancy A. Hewitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 047099858X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This collection of twenty-four original essays by leading scholars in American women's history highlights the most recent important scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field. Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including the colonial family, marriage, health, sexuality, education, immigration, work, consumer culture, and feminism. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes expanded bibliography of titles to guide further research.

After Lincoln

After Lincoln PDF Author: A. J. Langguth
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451617321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
With Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver. By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, "I'm afraid I'm elected." His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by implacable Southern resistance and by corruption during his two terms.--From publisher description.

Burying the Dead but Not the Past

Burying the Dead but Not the Past PDF Author: Caroline E. Janney
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807882704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.

Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807855737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.