Army at Home
Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front
Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, where they 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 confident in their new roles, these women became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials.
Giesberg provides a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to northern working-class family life.
University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Praise and reviews
“Civil War buffs, feminists, and labor historians, students of the complex intersection of class, race, location, and gender will all thank Judith Giesberg for her thoughtful sketching out and then filling in of the void in our current portrait of women in the northern states during this volatile period in American history. . . . Draws together all available scarce resources to make a convincing argument for the major changes that took place in the lives of rural, working-class white, and African-American women as a result of the gaps and opportunities in culture created by the war.”
– LINDA S. COLEMAN
Author of Professional and Public Writing
“Relying on extensive, detailed research, Giesberg tells her story with clarity and verve. [T]his book goes far toward to reminding us that the forgotten women who sewed the uniforms and made the munitions used in the war also felt that they sacrificed much, perhaps too much.”
– JANE TURNER CENSER
Author of The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895
All books by Judy
