Review: Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front

Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front by Judith Giesberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a look at the effects of the Civil War on women in the North. Giesberg details six specific areas of Northern life that were indelibly changed by the war on the homefront. Areas discussed include the life of rural women who were forced to manage farms alone without husbands and sons, women and their families that were displaced when they were no longer able to make house payments and rents, women in the workplace including those young ladies who lost their lives in the Alleghany Arsenal explosion, freedwomen who began the early civil rights movement, middle-class and working women whose loyalties were divided due to oppressive working conditions and marginality, and women who were left to find and bury the men they lost on the battlefields. In the Conclusion, there is a discussion of how little women were memorialized after the war, unlike their southern counterparts. The author surmises that for the women of the north, the line was blurred between the war on the battlefields and the war raging back at home for the women left to carry on without help or hope.

I thought this was a very good read and quite eye-opening. It seems that when women of the Civil War are discussed, many people think of southern women, the "Scarlett O'Hara" romanticized ideal women depicted in so many Civil War movies and novels. This book gives an accurate portrait of the trials and tribulations of the women left to manage life on the homefront. These women were the army at home.

View all my reviews