| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. By Elizabeth Young. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xvi, 389 pp. Cloth, $47.00, ISBN 0-226-96087-0. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-226-96088-9.)

With Disarming the Nation, Elizabeth Young has produced an illuminating analysis of women's Civil War literature that successfully challenges assertions that a heroic masculinity constituted the war's literary heritage. Investigating novels, plays, personal narratives, poems, and songs, Young demonstrates that women authors—white and African American, Northern and Southern—found in the war an opportunity for their own cultural intervention and personal reinventions. Taking as their themes the weakening of female dependency and slave subordination under military exigencies, these texts constituted acts of resistance, each illustrating the power of war to turn everything upside down. The theme of topsy-turvyness, introduced with a nuanced critique of the subversiveness contained in Harriet Beecher Stowe's character Topsy, affords Young a powerful conceptual tool for uncovering the ways in which a war over slavery inverted notions of white civility and bourgeois womanhood. Many of the writers who followed Stowe built on the concept of Topsy to reveal the war's transgressive potential. . . .

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