THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 54-56
© 2001 National Communication Association

Women and War:  The Civil War and Northern Women Writers 

Martha Solomon Watson

Lyde Cullen Sizer.  The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.  xvi + 348 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). 

For women, both North and South, the Civil War was a crisis that challenged their emotional, intellectual, economic, and physical resources.  Constrained by the doctrine of separate spheres, women bore the brunt of the domestic sacrifices that the war entailed without having the political power to affect decisions regarding its conduct.  This tension between the inevitable, substantial impact of the war in their lives and their limited access to the public sphere, where lively debates occurred about the struggle, stimulated some women to turn to writing to attempt to debate, contest, and confirm their understanding of their roles in wartime and in society in general.  In this book, Lyde Cullen Sizer, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College, traces how nine Northern women did the important cultural and ideological work of finding a voice and a place for their views of this critical social struggle.

In brief, Sizer argues that these nine women, whom she offers as representative for many more, struggled to create a rhetoric of unity to overcome the social cleavages in Northern society.  Attempting to claim a common purpose for Northern citizens and to define the North as fundamentally different from the South, in their writing these nine women reveal “a constant tension between ‘consent and resistance’ to that society” (6).   Sizer uses the literary works of these women, works designed for public consumption, to track a subtle but significant shift from sentimental to realistic writing.  At the same time, her analysis provides an intellectual portrait of these women, derived from their works before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.  For her sample, Sizer chooses nine disparate but representative women: Lydia Marie Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.  These women were exceptional in that they earned their living by writing, often supporting their families as well and in that they were probably more dedicated to ending slavery than were many of their contemporaries.  On the other hand, the widespread popularity of these women suggests that their views resonated with their readers.  Thus, Sizer feels comfortable as seeing them as “representative” of Northern women.  What she perceives in all of them is a warring between the yearning for self-expression and “a rhetoric of unity that flattens difference” (7).  As Sizer writes:

What I identify as the political work of women, then, was neither direct, nor purely radical or conservative , nor consistent in its messages. . . .  For all that, certain patterns emerged, if only in the breach.  Women writers used the opportunity to speak in the pages of literary magazines, political and religious newspapers, novels and stories, to change the way the nation saw the task it was undertaking.  They wrote out of a collective longing for a meaningful place in the polity; even if it meant denying a similar place to another woman.  This was their political work. (8-9)

After a brief introduction, Sizer’s book falls into nine chapters. Chapter 1, “Rowing against Wind and Tide: How Women Wrote,” provides a fascinating account of how these women, burdened with domestic responsibilities, managed to write at all. She groups the women generationally and regionally: Child, Stowe, and Fern are the New England Mothers; Southworth, Harper, and Davis are the Northern Borders, whose geographical location enabled them to provide a “more nuanced reading of the South” with “a more critical reading of the New England North” (37); and Hamilton, Alcott, and Phelps are the New England Daughters.  Despite the differences among them, all struggled to find time and space for their writing.  In addition, all tried to understand the war and its implications for them, their families, and the nation as a whole. 

The remainder of the chapters proceed chronologically from the 1850s through Reconstruction.  In each chapter, Sizer treats the writings of the women during that period as she also traces the evolution of their thinking and attitudes.  For example, chapter 6, “Woman’s Part of Glory,” explores women’s participation in the war as nurses, both at home and near the battlefield, as portrayed in the writings of the nine women.  In their novels and stories, the women depicted their female characters as responding to the question of what women could do to assist the war effort by defending their roles as nurses as stemming appropriately and naturally from their domestic responsibilities.   In contrast, chapter 8, “Still Waiting: Race and the Politics of Reconstruction,” explicates how these authors dealt with the debate over women’s rights versus the rights of newly freed blacks.  One recurrent theme in their works during this period was whiteness and blackness, especially in regard to “passing” as a social phenomenon.

Sizer’s project is an ambitious one and, for the most part, she carries it off well.  Not only do her discussions delineate the political and ideological work done by women during this period, but she also provides interesting glimpses of the authors themselves.  In the book, Sizer takes seriously the fictional writing of women as a mechanism for creating a shared social reality and providing an angle of vision for understanding the “meaning” of the Civil War.  Her command of the varied works of these women and her ability to relate the characters and plots to larger social issues are impressive.  However, the very breadth and scope of her book prevent her from delving deeply into any single work.  This is, then, rhetorical analysis on a broad scale, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.  The book would be a wonderful secondary text for a course in the rhetoric of the Civil War or of women’s rights.  Even if they do not choose to use the texts, instructors who teach such courses should be familiar with this book.  Although it does not provide the sort of detailed rhetorical analysis that one finds in more limited works or in essays, the book provides valuable insights into how women worked to create a meaning for the Civil War, a meaning that spoke directly to their own roles and lives. 

Martha Solomon Watson is Sanford Berman Professor of Communication and Dean of the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.