The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-- 1872. By Lyde Cullen Sizer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 348. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.) Lyde Cullen Sizer's book provides an examination of the political work of northern women's Civil War-era literary production. While a range of lesser-known writers are brought in for comparison, Sizer's analysis revolves around the work of nine major mid-century authors: Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Sizer argues that while the war did not result in significant economic or social changes in the lives of northern white women in general, it was intellectually transformative in providing women writers with a new "personal and cultural vision of possibility" (4) about what women were capable of and about the meaning of women's contributions to society, both political and domestic. Sizer sets out to write two intertwined histories. First, this is a literary history that examines women's fiction, poetry, and essays as a form of moral activism. These writers were reformers who engaged issues of antislavery, patriotism, separate spheres ideology, women's work, and national divisions along race, class, and geographical lines, though not always from the same perspective. Second, Sizer presents a group intellectual biography by highlighting the personal and political lives that informed the published work of these authors throughout the Civil War period. In addition to these purposes, Sizer integrates her literary-intellectual focus with a social history of northern women's lives during the war. Here she draws heavily upon secondary scholarship in women's history to provide necessary context for discussions of women's household work, the emotional costs of war for families, nursing, and women on the battlefield. The book proceeds in chronological fashion with a total of nine chapters dealing with specific time periods and prominent themes. Sizer begins with a discussion of the 1850s as the proving ground for the earliest writers in her group. During this decade of reform radicalism in the North, women writers took advantage of women's rights activism and the spread of the popular press to make their public voices heard. During the years leading up to the war, the women in Sizer's study wrote on antislavery themes and promoted what Sizer terms a "rhetoric of unity" (5) that attempted to clarify the moral purpose of the war. The chapters then progress steadily through the war itself, with Sizer illuminating the subtle but important shifts in women's literary emphases from the early days of the war, to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the bloodiest days of fighting, to preparation for the end of war, to early Reconstruction and a postwar vision of the future. Through this approach, Sizer ties literary themes to very specific civic and military moments, providing a more thorough political analysis of these writers and their texts than found in previous studies. Sizer's detailed chronological analysis also allows her to trace important differences among the authors. Despite early efforts to prepare the North for war by promoting a rhetoric of unity, as the fighting progressed, the women writers were increasingly split along political lines. Chapter four, on the "Crisis at Midwar," is the most thorough examination of these differences. …