The Civil War-era U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) was the largest wartime benevolent institution. Judith Ann Giesberg demonstrates convincingly that that generation of women provided a crucial link between the local evangelical crusades of the early nineteenth century and the sweeping national reform and suffrage movements of the postwar period.
Drawing on Sanitary Commission documents and memoirs, the author details how northern elite and middle-class women's experiences in and influence over the USSC formed the impetus for later reform efforts. Giesberg explores the ways in which women honed organizational and administrative skills, developed new strategies that combined strong centralized leadership with regional grassroots autonomy, and created a sisterhood that reached across class lines. She begins her study with an examination of the Woman's Central Association of Relief, an organization that gave birth to the USSC. Giesberg then discusses the significant roles of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Dorothea Lynde Dix, and Henry Whitney Bellows, and considers the rationale for bringing women and men together in a collaborative wartime relief program. She shows how Louisa Lee Schuyler, Abigail Williams May, and other young women maneuvered and challenged the male-run Commission as they built an effective national network for giving critical support to soldiers on the battlefield and their families on the home front.
This fresh perspective on the evolution of women's political culture fills an important gap in the literature, and it will appeal to historians, women's studies scholars, and Civil War buffs alike.

Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865, touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community's reaction to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of the social life of Philadelphia's black community. The diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in "real time" through the perspective of a free black woman, providing a voice in counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period.
Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction to the work, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of Philadelphia during the war. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war's major events, Davis's diaries give us a rare look into how the war was lived as a part of personal, everyday life, as its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected life in a northern city with a vibrant black community.

Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865, touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community's reaction to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of the social life of Philadelphia's black community. The diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in "real time" through the perspective of a free black woman, providing a voice in counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period.
Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction to the work, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of Philadelphia during the war. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war's major events, Davis's diaries give us a rare look into how the war was lived as a part of personal, everyday life, as its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected life in a northern city with a vibrant black community.

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.

Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.

The scholarship on women's experiences in the U.S. Civil War is rich and deep, but much of it remains regionally specific or subsumed in more general treatments of Northern and Southern peoples during the war. In a series of eight paired essays, scholars examine women's comparable experiences across the regions, focusing particularly on women's politics, wartime mobilization, emancipation, wartime relief, women and families, religion, reconstruction, and Civil War memory. In each pairing, historians analyze women's lives, interests, and engagement in public issues and private concerns and think critically about what stories and questions still need attention. Among their questions are: What rightly counts as war mobilization, what is relief work, and what was women's relationship to the state in each case? How did women's growing suspicions about the wartime state intrude on the state's ability to prosecute war? How were gender expectations in both regions riven with assumptions about race and class, what of this survived the war, and how was gender recast in the aftermath of emancipation? How did women define and even direct the trajectory of war and its meaning? These and other questions emerging from this book will inform and encourage new work on women in the war and will invite scholars to look at the period with fresh perspective.