| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 220 words from this article are provided below; about 528 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nina Silber. Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. 332. $29.95.

In her prologue, historian Nina Silber identifies two themes that her book on northern women during the Civil War aims to pursue. First, Silber points to the emergence—as early as 1862—of a harsh public critique of women's contributions to the Union's war effort. Second, Silber asserts that, through their wide-ranging activism on behalf of the Union, northern women forged a new but not necessarily more independent relationship with the state. Challenging historians who have interpreted northern women's war work as leading only in the direction of female emancipation, Silber argues that the picture is significantly more complicated: "I do not see the war," she writes, "as offering simply an either-or proposition for Northern women, a choice between liberation or oppression" (p. 11). Rather, the war generated for the Union's daughters both "new opportunities" in the public realm and a "new form of subordination" to the nation-state (p. 13). It seems to me that the book grapples more substantially and effectively with this second theme of the war's mixed consequences for Yankee women; the first theme receives less consistent attention, and the evidence deployed to support it is somewhat less persuasive.

. . .

There are about 528 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.