Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 0809016222
In 1984, Catherine Clinton's The Other Civil War was a pioneering survey of accomplishments and experience of a century of women. The revisions update the story with recent research, enriching but not fundamentally changing the nature or organization. It's still one of the best thorough reviews of what happened during a century of incredible change for women.
Clinton's preface to this edition reveals that in 1978, at Princeton University, she was asked to cover the subject of American women in the nineteenth century -- in one lecture. As she says, today "this recollection seems incomprehensible."
She begins with colonial women, and the way in which the American Revolution affected women's lives. From there, she covers the ways in which the Industrial Revolution in the North, the cotton economy in the South, and westward expansion changed work and home life. The rise of the middle class helped enforce an ideology of segregation of the male sphere -- the public -- and the female sphere -- the home. Within that female sphere, though, Clinton documents the many rich ways that women found to exercise autonomy: in religious revivals, in the beginnings of female higher education, in missionary work, in women's fiction writing, and in folk and home arts such as embroidery and quilting.
Clinton's story continues with women's accomplishments as they organized voluntary associations to aid the poor and to reform social conditions. Founded to protect women and children from arbitrary husbands and fathers, the temperance movement worked for legal and social change. Other groups worked on the problems of prostitution, some were involved in utopian communities, but perhaps the best known of the women reformers of the early nineteenth century were the antislavery crusaders: Lydia Maria Child, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Maria Weston Chapman, Lucretia Mott and others.
The Other Civil War draws the connection between women anti-slavery advocates and the early campaigns to include women, too, in the freedoms of America. In this as in other discussions, Clinton focuses more on the way life changed for most women, with occasional mention of the specific women who were leaders or whose contributions to the changes were and are more recognized: the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and Susan B. Anthonys.
The American Civil War interrupted the growing tide for women's equality, and in The Other Civil War we find women participating in support roles primarily but occasionally as spies or disguised soldiers. But, Clinton explains, the strongest effect of the American Civil War on women was the absence of husbands and fathers during the war, and the loss of over half a million lives, almost entirely men, in the war, resulting in increased responsibilities and the absence of men in the lives of many women.
In this as in most topics, Clinton includes the history of black women. The effect of the Civil War was to free those black women and men who had been slaves, but the granting of suffrage to ex-slaves after the war did not include black women. And, as Clinton covers in some detail, the Fourteenth Amendment, granting ex-slaves the vote, split the women's suffrage movement. Some worked for equal suffrage (voting right) for all, and accepted that working for black male suffrage would eventually open the door for women's suffrage. But others reacted strongly to the first time that the wording "male citizen" was introduced into the Constitution.
While Clinton covers the movement for women's voting rights admirably, she does not let this struggle overshadow the many other changes and trends that also affected women's experience. The growing role of women in medicine, the western expansion's effect on both the women who moved west to hardship and challenge and also the lives of the Native American women displaced by that movement -- the immigrant experience -- employment and education changes -- new movements for social reform -- a return to the "domestic sphere" in Victorian ideology -- all were also important to women's history.
If you want to understand the history of American women, this is almost required reading. In fact, to understand American history without understanding what happened to women in our first 125 years, you'll need to know much of what's in this volume. With the revisions, it's even more valuable.
Title: The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, Revised Edition
Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 0809016222
