The subject of gender and the Civil War is explored from a variety of angles in Catherine
Clinton and Nina Silber, eds,
Divided Houses Genderand the Civil War (New York and Oxford Oxford University Press, and in a subsequent volume,
Battle Scars Gender and Sexuality in theAmerican Civil War (New York and Oxford Oxford University Press, Other essay collections that contain valuable work on women in the war include Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds,
Union Soldiers and theNorthern Home Front Wartime Experiences,
Postwar Adjustments (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2002), and Joan E. Cashin, ed,
The War was Youand Me Civilians in the American Civil War (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002). Elizabeth Young,
Disarming the Nation:Women’s Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago, IL University of
Chicago Press, 1999) explores the literary response to the conflict, a theme developed further in Alice Fahs’s
The Imagined Civil War Popular Literatureof the North and South,
1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, NC, and London University of North Carolina Press, On Union women specifically, Jeanie Attie,
Patriotic Toil Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, NY, and London Cornell
University Press, 1998), and Judith Ann Giesberg,
Civil War Sisterhood The US. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston,
MA: Northeastern University Press, 2000), are the best places to start, but students will soon realize how much more has been written on Southern and Confederate—the two, obviously,
not being synonymous, since few,
if any, African-American women would have described themselves as
Confederates—women in the war. Here the literature really begins with Anne
Firor Scott,
The Southern Lady From Pedestal to Politics,
1830–1930 (Chicago,
IL, and London University of Chicago Press, 1970), and is developed in a range of studies, including Edward DC. Campbell, Jr, and Kym S. Rice,
eds.,
A Woman’s War Southern Women,
Civil War,
and the Confederate Legacy (Richmond, VA Museum of the Confederacy, and Charlottesville,
VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996), an excellent introduction to the complexities of the Southern woman’s Civil War Catherine Clinton, ed.,
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