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Loading... Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil Warby Elizabeth D. Leonard
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Looks at how lives of Northern women who wanted to help their country during the Civil War were constrained by the social customs of the time period. Considers Mary Edwards Walker, Sophriona Bucklin, and Annie Wittenmyer. Examines their lives after the war. Then looks at the way late 19th century historians like Brockett interpreted these women and their contributions to the war. Excellent scholarly work. This is a non-fiction examination of 3 different northern women who became active in supporting the civil war effort. One served as an army nurse, one as an organizer of a relief effort to provide supplies to soldiers, the third as a medical doctor. The author's main focus was on the gender roles of middle-class people before, during, and after the war. I thought she did an adequate job of demonstrating that middle class women before the war were expected to provide care and nurturing to their families and communities, but were not permitted to be active outside this protective sphere, and certainly not allowed to perform services for pay. During the war, women wanted to become involved in the union cause, and were able to make a case that nursing and providing other kinds of charitable support (providing food, clothing, medical supplies, etc) to the soldiers from local regiments fell within the socially acceptable roles they had been allotted. However the question of receiving a salary for performing "women's work" was a controversial one. But while the upper class ladies could afford to volunteer their services, the middle class women had families to support while their husbands and fathers were away fighting. They were WILLING to serve, but could not AFFORD to do so unless they were paid. Lower class women do not figure into this argument at all - they were forced to work for pay even before the war. The arguments became more convoluted when the facts revealed that men serving in these roles during the war received salaries as a matter of course, that the women were doing excellent work - even compared to the men, and that allowing women to perform these supporting tasks freed men up for more active military duties. The third example, the woman doctor, did not follow the same eventual course to acceptance. However, I never fully understood whether Leonard believed this to be due to the higher level of skill and responsibility involved in her work compared to the other ladies, or whether it was due to the particular traits of this one woman. By all accounts, she was "odd" and did little to cause others to want to accept her. The last part of the book consists of an examination of the postwar historical writings about the role of women during the war. Leonard seems to believe that most of society (that is, the men) just wanted the women to go back to the way they were before, and tried to write the histories to indicate that this is exactly what happened. In fact, it was not exactly what happened. Because of their efforts during the civil war, professional nursing and charitable organizational work became acceptable for middle class women. On the other hand, the case of female medical doctors was a different matter. For any number of reasons, female (or negro) medical doctors were not generally accepted until the mid-20th century - many years after the civil war ended. It was this last section of the book that broke down for me. I'm not sure what points she kept trying to make, but the last 30 or 40 pages seemed very repetitive. No new arguments made, no new conclusions reached. The book has extensive footnotes and bibliography, which I admittedly did not examine closely. The book isn't long - only 200 pages of text - but I found it slow going. The writing seems forced and wooden, more like the regurgitation of facts by a student than the authoritative assertion and support of a theory by an expert in the field that I would have prefered. However, the topic and facts were new to me so I am able to rate the book 3 stars. Someone who is more familiar with the subject might rate it differently. no reviews | add a review
In Yankee women: Gender Battles in the Civil War, Elizabeth Leonard portrays the multiple ways in which women dedicated themselves to the Union. By delving deeply into the lives of three women - Sophronia Bucklin, Annie Wittenmyer, and Mary Walker - Leonard brings to life the daily manifestations of women's wartime service. Bucklin traveled to the frontline hospitals to nurse the wounded and ill, bearing the hardships along with the men. Wittenmyer extended her antebellum charitable activities to organizing committees to supply goods for the troops in Iowa, setting up orphanages for the children of Union soldiers, and creating and managing special diet kitchens for the sick soldiers. Mary Walker forms her own unique category. A feminist and dress reformer, she became the only woman to sign a contract as a doctor for the Union forces. In hospitals and at the battlefront, she tended the wounded in her capacity as a physician and even endured imprisonment as a spy. In their service to the Union, these women faced not only the normal privations of war but also other challenges that thwarted many of their efforts. Bucklin was more daring than some nurses in confronting those in charge if she felt she was being prevented from doing what was needed for the soldiers under her care. In her memoir, she recounted the frictions between the men and women supposedly toiling for a unified purpose. Wittenmyer, like other women in soldiers' aid, also had to stand up to male challengers. When the governor of Iowa appointed a male-dominated, state sanitary commission in direct conflict with her own Keokuk Ladies' Aid Society, Wittenmyer and the women who worked with her fought successfully to keep their organization afloat and get the recognition they deserved. Walker struggled throughout most of the war to be acknowledged as a physician and to receive a surgeon's appointment. Her steadfast will prevailed in getting her a contract but not a commission, and even her contract could not withstand the end of the war. Despite the desperate need for doctors, Walker's dress and demand for equal treatment provoked the anger of the men in a position to promote her cause. After telling these women's stories, Leonard evokes the period after the Civil War when most historians tried to rewrite history to show how women had stepped out of their "normal natures" to perform heroic tasks, but were now able and willing to retreat to the domesticity that had been at the center of their prewar lives. Postwar historians thanked women for their contributions at the same time that they failed fully to consider what those contributions had been and the conflicts they had provoked. Mary Walker's story most clearly reveals the divisiveness of these conflicts. But no one could forget the work women had accomplished during the war and the ways in which they had succeeded in challenging the prewar vision of Victorian womanhood. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.7History and Geography North America United States Administration of Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865 Civil WarLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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