Glymph, Thavolia
The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation
UNC Press (Chapel Hill)
2020
OUR SYNOPSIS: Thavolia Glymph explores how “The Civil War brought American women into unprecedented contact across the divides of race, gender, class, and region. It revived old, largely unanswered and even unformulated questions about the meaning of home, freedom, citizenship, national belonging, and women’s relationship to these ideas and each other.” (2) She argues that women who experienced intersectional oppression before the Civil War found the conflict uncovered promise for social advancement and equality gains. In the South, the war disrupted homes and made visible violence and divisions. Enslaved women were liberated and empowered, while white women mourned the loss of their power as enslavers. Glymph moves between insightful vignettes focusing on individual women and their interactions with other women. In the North, middle- and upper-class women joined the war effort via household production, hospital work, and more. Working-class northerners greatly contributed to domestic production of war materials.
BIG QUESTIONS:
To what extent did empowerment and social changes for women during the Civil War continue after the war ended? How did this differ across regions and across lines of race and class?
How did the wartime context open up new opportunities for Black women’s resistance?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Black women sympathized with the Union, fought, prayed, sacrificed, and died for it and fought for their freedom. They were soldiers’ wives and refugees who labored on plantations run or leased by the Federal government; they were cooks and field hands, mothers and daughters. The vast majority remained enslaved for the duration of the war, but they made Confederate-occupied plantations, farms, towns, cities, factories, and hospitals sites of resistance.” (88)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
J. S. W. [Jane Stuart Woolsey] to Cousin Margaret Hodge, February 7, 1861, in Letters of a Family during the War for the Union, 1861-1865, vol. 1 (Printed for Private Distribution, 1899), 32-34, https://www.loc.gov/item/99000873/.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
See the primary source above.
