“The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of War, 1861-1900” by Alice Fahs

This enlightening article highlights the role of women and gender as presented through Northern literature during and after the Civil War. Alice Fahs begins with the traditional narrative that women had no place in war and knew nothing about it. An anonymous woman who wrote to a Union paper believed otherwise. According to Fahs, women were actively involved in “wartime concerns.” Fahs discusses the importance of feminized literature that stressed “the importance of women’s contributions to the war effort, but increasingly it argued that women’s homefront suffering were equal to, or even greater than, those of men in battle” (Fahs 1462).

An important part of the wartime effort, the female side of the war was presented through “stories, essays, poems, articles, novels, broadsides, and cartoons” (Fahs 1462). This provided women with an active role in the Civil War narrative. Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular Civil War era magazines, and continuing into the twentieth century, featured over sixty percent feminized stories from 1862-1864 (1463).

I found Fahs’s mention that in the years following the Civil War, the strong female presence and perspective seen during the war dissipated, as the “memory” and narrative of the war story shifted to the male perspective to be one of the most interesting parts of the article, and is something that I had not previously thought of. Now knowing the significant body of work published about women in the war effort is an important part of the Civil War that disappeared from American minds in the late nineteenth century. Fahs says that it then began to be “increasingly redefined as a man’s only war” (1464).

The author makes a strong connection between women supporting men enlisting in the war and the idea of “revolutionary mothers”, recalling the iconography of Betsy Ross and the few other colonial women referenced in popular culture (1465). This interesting analysis makes a strong case for the romanticism of a woman’s “duty” to husband, brother, family, and country. Popular songs and poems were created and widely distributed, all using women’s perspectives, all for the cause. One example is the story of Barbara Frietchie who heroically asks that Confederate soldiers kill her before they harm the Union flag (1469). Though many were supportive of the war effort (in the North), women’s emotions are an integral part of feminized literature. “In feminized war literature women’s emotions, especially their tears, were often portrayed as giving appropriate value to men’s actions” (1466). While it is not mentioned directly, this might be an interesting piece of propaganda to support the war effort.

A very different feminized narrative of the Civil War is war romances, which appeared plentiful in number in numerous publications. At the same time, loss and suffering play a key role in the Civil War with the staggering numbers of deaths and casualties. Winslow Homer’s words push the notion of “women’s words—represented as deeper than those of men—were at the emotional center of the nation” (1476).

The demise of the legacy of feminized literature during the Civil War came about during a change in tone with as Fahs says, “the rise of literary fiction”, therefore these perhaps exaggerated and outdone stories were laughed out of popularity by a more masculine aesthetic of realism, “explicitly disavowing earlier sentimental and domestic norms” (1489).

It is important to note that this article focuses on the northern women’s perspective on the war, and does not largely consider the perspectives of southern white women or slaves. Additionally, Fahs does not go in great depth into what women’s stories of the war. I would’ve liked to see a few more examples.  Despite this, I am the advocate for this essay, and I do believe that Alice Fahs examination into feminized literature of the Civil War to be thorough and thoughtful. It provides an interesting context to a heavily studied era in American History, although other than the origins of modern medicine—and the assistance of female nurses, and the southern belle narrative of Gone With the Wind. The former is getting more attention with a new PBS show Mercy Street. Putting that aside, the role of women, near the battlefield, and at home, had a tremendous impact on the Civil War through popular literature at the time, a lens, and the significance of it that has been all but forgotten in the collective American memory, Alice Fahs does a fantastic job of bringing it back to life.

– William Kowalik