Daughters of the Union

Challenging prevalent misconceptions about women's role in the Civil War North, Nina Silber offers a fascinating account of how the war experience both opened new opportunities for female independence and tied women more and more closely to the needs of an activist state. An important addition to our understanding of the crisis of the Union. -- Eric Foner, De Witt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
Southern women both white and black became direct participants in a Civil War that in many cases swept over their homes and farms. While the same was not true for most Northern women, they too experienced unprecedented engagement with public affairs as they mobilized themselves to support the war. Nina Silber's excellent study of this engagement gives new and broader meaning to Lincoln's description of the Civil War as 'a People's contest'- all the people. -- James M. McPherson, author of Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg
This is the most comprehensive and deeply researched study of northern women in the Civil War to date, and one of the best books on gender in crisis in many years. Silber's achievement is profound: an engaging, nuanced, persuasive story of how the Civil War did not progressively put women on the course of liberation, but by throwing them into the civic realm in unprecedented ways, fostered a new realization of their political selves and of their social and legal subordination. Silber's Yankee women are patriots, rarely feminist heroines, always complex historical actors. -- David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
We have all eagerly awaited this indispensable book. Nina Silber's engaging and definitive study presents a new side of the Civil War experience in the North and a new dimension of the history of American women. -- Drew Faust, author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
Northern women have remained a curiously neglected group in the massive literature on the Civil War. Nina Silber's study brings them to the fore, examining the myriad ways in which the conflict impinged on their lives and underscoring the complex legacy it bequeathed in terms of their relationship to the nation-state. Admirably researched, clearly written, and forcefully argued, this splendid book will appeal to anyone interested in how women of the North fit into the grand mosaic of our defining national trial. -- Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War
In this provocative, challenging work, Silber writes ordinary women onto the page and reshapes the boundaries of Civil War history. Her attention to the presence of Northern black women is particularly noteworthy. * Publishers Weekly *
Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War is an innovative analysis that is sure to inspire a reconsideration of northern women's patriotism and its long-term results. Silber's analytical strengths and narrative style make this an engaging study for students and scholars of both women's and Civil War history. -- Victoria E. Ott * Journal of Southern History *
Nina Silber uses [an] ordinary woman's appeal to the president to reveal the complexities of Northern women's relationships with the nation-state during the Civil War...In this concise and accessible work, Silber argues that the Civil War brought Northern women into a more public relationship with the federal government, but that this relationship was framed in terms of their subordination to it. Using women's diaries and letters, she discusses how such changes affected Northern women and their understandings of women's civic and political responsibilities. While many historians see the Civil War as prodding Northern women to increased autonomy and feminist political action, Silber demonstrates that the war's impact on women was more complicated than that. The war brought neither complete liberation nor complete oppression for women, but a bit of both...There are important lessons here for scholars in many fields, as Silber shows how women's experiences in wartime both reveal and affect social, cultural, and political events. -- Kara Dixon Vuic * Journal of Military History *
This important book fills a significant gap in existing scholarship on women and the Civil War. By focusing on northern women in general, rather than on the minority who left home to engage in war work, it reveals that paying attention to women--even those who did not play a large role in organized war work--changes our understanding of the legacy of the Civil War itself. -- Barbara Cutter * Annals of Iowa *
Daughters of the Union is an important tome in the canon of Civil War women's studies...Dr. Silber brings a fresh perspective to the active participation of Northern women during the war. Her thesis is well documented and should be required reading in Civil War history programs and political science curriculum, in addition to women's studies programs. -- Janet Leigh Bucklew * H-Net Online *