Women in the Civil War by Mary Elizabeth Massey, Jean V. Berlin (Introduction)

Product Details

Synopsis

The Civil War wrought cataclysmic changes in the lives of American Women on both sides of the conflict. Women in the Civil War demonstrates their enterprise, fortitude, and fierceness. In this revealing social history, Massey focuses on many famous women, including nurses Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Mother Bickerdyke; spies Pauline Cushman and Belle Boyd; writers Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Chestnut; pamphleteer and military strategist Anna Ella Carroll; black abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; feminists Susan B. Anthony and Jane Grey Swisshelm; and political wives Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. The anonymous women who maintained farms and plantations are described, as are camp followers, businesswomen, entertainers, activists, and socialites in Charleston and Washington.

Library Journal

Originally titled Bonnet Brigades, this volume "presents a comprehensive yet readable account of a long-neglected aspect of American history" (LJ 8/66). Massey contends that the Civil War aided women's emancipation by creating "nondomestic opportunities" for them as industrial workers, writers, and even spies.

Biography

Mary Elizabeth Massey also wrote Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront. Introducing this Bison Books edition is Jean V. Berlin. She is an assistant editor of the correspondence of William T. Sherman.