Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War

by Catherine Clinton

Book Overview

No American needs to be told that the Civil War brought the United States to a critical juncture in its history. The war changed forever the face of the nation, the nature of American politics, the status of African-Americans, and the daily lives of millions of people. Yet few of us understand how the war transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among American citizens. Divided Houses is the first book to address this sorely neglected...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195080343
• ISBN13: 9780195080346
• Release Date: December 1992
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Gender Wartime Crisis in a Historical Perspective

Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War is a collection of essays pertaining to the crisis in gender relations that accompanied the Civil War in America. As a collection, the essays present a narrative that chronicles the various impacts on gender that affected men and women, the North and the South, as well as slaves and non-slaves. What emerges is a cohesive body of text that is informative, illuminating, and instructive. The themes most explored in this volume are those of empowerment through abolitionism. In The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender Relations by Leann Whites, the two groups most perceptive of the gender crisis were Northern feminists and black abolitionists. During the Civil War, the public status of motherhood increased. This leads to another theme that will later be explored in following essays, that of the State as family. In this first essay, Leann Whites argues that the Civil War created circumstances for gender equality, both diminishing white Southern male masculinity and increasing black manhood. Ideas of manhood during the Civil War are further investigated in Part II and in Reid Mitchell's Soldiering, Manhood, and Coming of Age: A Northern Volunteer. The journey from civilian to soldier was mirrored in the transition from boyhood to manhood, and the constitution of manhood evolved as a delicate balance of masculinity and manly restraint. During the Civil War, the body politic as well as the army assumed familial ties to facilitate solidarity. Despite the changes in notions of manhood, for the black male population the "empowerment" was not always beneficial. Jim Cullen's Gender and African-American Men details how conceptions of black manhood changed during the Civil War, with the mastery over one's own body leading to mastery in warfare. Despite being placed on some of the most dangerous fronts, black soldiers endured low pay and high disease in exchange for their mastery over their bodies. In Part III of Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, the themes move from issues of manhood to those relating to women. In Arranging a Doll's House: Refined Women as Union Nurses author Kristie Ross writes about female volunteers on hospital transports, and she draws from the familial theme by presenting the hospital transport as the rearrangement of a doll's house to appear domestic. Ross also reveals a sense of agency for women volunteers, claiming that many felt "...an eagerness to seize an occasion to escape the routine pattern of their lives and a familiarity with genteel standards of household organization." (101) Lyde Cullen Sizer's Acting Her Part: Narratives of Union Women Spies also deals with the issue of female agency during the Civil War, but Sizer further examines the repercussions women felt depending on whether they were white or black. For white women spies, their efforts were more dramatic than substantial, whereas for black abolitionists like Harriet Tubman the cause and consequences of b