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Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. By Nina Silber. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 332 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01677-7.)
Nina Silber's study explores the experiences of northern women during the Civil War to assess the effects of the conflict on female political identities. Delving into private letters and memoirs, she provides a portrait of women who coped with economic vulnerabilities, loneliness, and the specter of loss, while struggling to maintain household economies, aid soldiering men, and act on their political beliefs. Daughters of the Union views the Civil War as an agent of change that created a new civic identity for northern women, an identity that ultimately proved more frustrating than empowering.
Women's wartime experiences were shaped by a sudden visibility and demands for sacrifices that generated contradictory pressures and unwelcome scrutiny of their lives. With their benevolent labors necessary to the military struggle and their household labors increasingly onerous, northern women approached their work with a new seriousness. One of the criticisms that contemporaries leveled...