ABSTRACT

It has become axiomatic among scholars of the American Civil War to think of that conflict as precipitating a "crisis in gender". Early on, much of the new gender scholarship explored the expanding roles and increased public authority for women that resulted from wartime mobilization. More recently, however, historians have widened their focus to consider how gender shaped not only why war broke out in 1861, but also how the war was waged on the battlefield, in the halls of Congress, and in private homes north and south. The Civil War exposed long-simmering tensions about the proper roles of men and women, blacks and whites, but it also reshaped those meanings in lasting ways. Once commonly portrayed simply as the "brothers' war", the Civil War now appears to be a wide-ranging conflict fought by women as well as men, in bedrooms as well as battlefields, and with ideas as well as artillery.