Book Review

In Ken Burns's documentary film series The Civil War, Shelby Foote calls the war the "crossroads of our being," assigning it a central place in national mythmaking. The question at the heart of Lyde Cullen Sizer's engaging and impressively researched study is: how did northern women imagine that "crossroads"? Sizer examines the published writings of nine authors who were selected on the basis of literary productivity, cultural influence, and ongoing engagement with the war's meaning(s): Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Gail Hamilton. Organized chronologically, the study begins in the 1850s when, Sizer argues, women's authority to interpret the impending conflict was first claimed (largely by defining it in moral terms) and concludes in the 1890s when texts such as Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) sought in the war a legacy of female empowerment. While her story, Sizer insists, is not a "Rosie the Riveter" tale, she demonstrates that the war shifted the gender landscape: it created new professional and work opportunities for women, allowed them to reimagine their relation to politics by fueling a sense of civic purpose, and fostered what Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., the editors of the History of Woman Suffrage (1882–1887), called "a revolution in woman herself."

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