Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Rather than take the risks posed by nursing, far more women found their ways to new jobs in Northern and Southern textile mills, hurriedly manufacturing cartridges, clothing, and military equipment under the wide umbrella of government war contracts. The absence of men also created a gap in teaching, another previously all-male profession that now began to admit women, and the explosive growth in government paperwork opened up employment for women in government and Treasury offices. By the end of the war, the U.S. Treasury was employing 447 “treasury girls” as copyists and currency counters.62

What is not clear is whether these new opportunities, however much satisfaction they gave, opened any new windows for redefining political or social power for women. Many of the wartime positions available to women were as replacements for men, and those positions often disappeared as soon as the war was over and the men returned. It was only at incidental moments that a real departure for women and genuine movement toward gender equality took shape. In 1863, a core group of women veterans of the Seneca Falls convention organized a Women’s National Loyal League, which took as its primary object the creation of a massive petition drive in support of an amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery as a legal institution. That, in turn, became the organizational platform from which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony launched a parallel movement in 1866, the American Equal Rights Association, to ensure a similar constitutional amendment which would grant voting rights to women.

The only real weapons Stanton and Anthony had at their disposal were petitions and persuasion, and they gained little ground against the entrenched legal restraints that deprived women in many states not only of the vote but also of the most basic republican privilege, property ownership. Mary Ashton Livermore, who had already carved out a prominent career as a reformer and editor of a religious magazine in the 1850s, turned her organizing talents to private fund-raising for the United States Sanitary Commission during the war. When she attempted to sign a contract for constructing the fairgrounds for the 1863 Northwestern Sanitary Fair in Chicago, however, she was politely informed that no contract with her signature on it had any legal standing, even if she paid the contractors in cash. Only her husband’s signature carried any standing in Illinois law. “By the laws of the state in which we lived, our individual names were not worth the paper on which they were written.” In the face of this legal stonewalling and the demand to combine gender and racial civil rights, Stanton and Anthony were unable to hold their equal-rights movement together, and the drive fractured into a radical wing led by Stanton and Anthony (which continued to press for a national constitutional amendment) and a moderate wing led by Mary Livermore and Henry Ward Beecher (which wanted to limit the campaign to what could be accomplished in state legislatures). None of them lived to see American women gain the right to vote in 1920.63

The war brought changes to American women, but only some changes and only to some women. In the confusion caused by the war, both the number of women who left the domestic sphere to find work in the field, the government office, or the hospital and the number of jobs that women were admitted to be capable of doing increased. But the war that had made this movement possible also doomed its further growth, since so much of this work was the creature of the war itself. The legal structure of restraints on women remained unchanged, and once the war was over, the tide of women’s advance into new realms of work and life receded to its prewar boundaries. This retreat was reinforced by a certain measure of class as well as gender expectations. Black women and lower-class white women had never been part of the domestic expectation, and both had always worked outside the domestic boundary; only the national emergency of the war sanctioned the movement of upper- and middle-class white women in the same outward direction. Once that emergency was over, the class bias of women’s work reasserted itself, and women’s work outside the family circle reclaimed its stigma of being “poor folks’ work.”

The Civil War represented neither advance nor retreat for American women, but only a moment of unspeakable turbulence when all the customary handholds disappeared and men and women were forced to find new ways through the storm of conflict. For Clara Barton, who made her Civil War nursing career the foundation for organizing the International Red Cross, the war meant a gain of what Barton estimated to be “fifty years in advance of the normal position which continued peace… would have assigned her.” For Susan B. Anthony, the postwar crusader for women’s rights, the war actually stifled most of the progress women had made toward winning the right to vote. It was “the crime of the ages” for the United States to fight “for national supremacy over the states to enslave & disenfranchise—and then refuse to exercise that power on behalf of half the people.” Barton and Anthony looked at the war from two very different angles, and perhaps neither were entirely right or, as another generation would demonstrate, entirely wrong.64

A “UNION ALWAYS SWARMING WITH BLATHERERS”

By the fall of 1863, the Civil War had taken on new and unexpected shapes for all Americans. The political goals of the war had expanded for both Northerners and Southerners, from simple reunion to emancipation in the Northern case, and from simple secession to the forging of a new Confederate nation in the South. The added turmoil of moving millions of people out of their homes and out of the accustomed tracks of their lives, and the relentlessly-lengthening casualty lists threatened to break up and disorganize an entire generation of American lives. After