| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 245 words from this article are provided below; about 476 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, 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.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• 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 Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
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 Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. By Nina Silber. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 332 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01677-7.)
Nina Silber's study explores the experiences of northern women during the Civil War to assess the effects of the conflict on female political identities. Delving into private letters and memoirs, she provides a portrait of women who coped with economic vulnerabilities, loneliness, and the specter of loss, while struggling to maintain household economies, aid soldiering men, and act on their political beliefs. Daughters of the Union views the Civil War as an agent of change that created a new civic identity for northern women, an identity that ultimately proved more frustrating than empowering.	1
Women's wartime experiences were shaped by a sudden visibility and demands for sacrifices that generated contradictory pressures and unwelcome scrutiny of their lives. With their benevolent labors necessary to the military struggle and their household labors increasingly onerous, northern women approached their work with a new seriousness. One of the criticisms that contemporaries leveled at northern women—that they were less patriotic than their southern counterparts—underscored the paradoxical position held by northern women. To meet their new obligations in the private sphere, women would have to remove themselves from national politics, limiting their ability to serve the state. The gendered division of labor hindered women's ability to find economic strategies to survive the war and to gain political skills to become more fully engaged.	. . .

There are about 476 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.