ABSTRACT
There was little activity on an organizational level for women’s rights, but women’s wartime experiences awakened more women (and men) to their capabilities for civic contribution as they nursed, organized fund raisers and charity drives, took over family businesses, and engaged in other war-related service. Research on woman’s publications focuses primarily on suffrage journals and the more “mainstream” periodicals of the nineteenth century, such as Godey’s Lady Book and Ladies’ Home Journal. Some articles in the Mayflower reflected a growing enmity between Northern and Southern women. The wartime cessation of women’s rights activity was, perhaps, the greatest factor in the Mayflower’s demise. Still, the predominant image of womanhood presented in the Mayflower is of strong, vigorous women who were equal with men — an image made more visible and manifest in wartime service.
