Booked by HooksBookEvents: Thursday, March 12, 2009
Book: Gender and The Sectional Conflict
Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
About the Book: In an exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among northerners and southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War’s participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their “causes” and obligations in wartime.
Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war.” Silber’s investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women – black and white – on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that northern and southern women were remembered after the war ended.