Northern Women, Work, and the U.S. Civil War, 1861-1867

FAIN: FT-54152-06

Judith Ann Giesberg
Villanova University (Villanova, PA 19085-1478)

Women working to serve soldiers and care for their own families during the U.S. Civil War created alternative and unorthodox sites for political engagement. I examine a number of these sites – Philadelphia’s streetcars; the streets of Boston’s Irish North End community; county courthouses in rural Pennsylvania; relief offices and almshouses in cities throughout the north; and the grounds of U.S. Army arsenals in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The principal goal of this project is to understand how the war was fought in the spaces of everyday life, where women worked to affect its outcome abroad and to give it meaning at home.

Associated Products

Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Book)
Title: Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front
Author: Judith Giesberg
Abstract: Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.
Year: 2009
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 080783307X
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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