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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.
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