Battle Scars Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War

by Clinton, Catherine; Silber, Nina

• ISBN13: 9780195174441
• ISBN10: 0195174445
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-02-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Over a decade ago, the publication of Divided Houses ushered in a new field of scholarship on gender and the Civil War. Following in its wake, Battle Scars showcases insights from award-winning historians as well as emerging scholars. This volume depicts the ways in which gender, race,nationalism, religion, literary culture, sexual mores, and even epidemiology underwent radical transformations from when Americans went to war in 1861 through Reconstruction. Examining the interplay among such phenomena as racial stereotypes, sexual violence, trauma, and notions of masculinity,Battle Scars represents the best new scholarship on men and women in the North and South and highlights how lives were transformed by this era of tumultuous change.

Author Biography

Catherine Clinton is a historian and the author of many titles, including Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. Nina Silber is Associate Professor of History at Boston University and the author, most recently, of Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. They co-edited Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (OUP, 1992).

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
1 Introduction. Colliding and Collaborating: Gender and Civil War Scholarship	3	(16)
Nina Silber
2 Fighting Like Men: Civil War Dilemmas of Abolitionist Manhood	19	(22)
Stephen Kantrowitz
3 "Oh I Pass Everywhere": Catholic Nuns in the Gulf South during the Civil War	41	(20)
Virginia Gould
4 "Public Women" and Sexual Politics during the American Civil War	61	(17)
Catherine Clinton
5 The Other Side of Freedom: Destitution, Disease, and Dependency among Freedwomen and Their Children during and after the Civil War	78	(26)
Jim Downs
6 Mary Walker, Mary Surratt, and Some Thoughts on Gender in the Civil War	104	(16)
Elizabeth D. Leonard
7 Embattled Manhood and New England Writers, 1860-1870	120	(20)
John Stauffer
8 Sexual Terror in the Reconstruction South	140	(28)
Lisa Cardyn
9 Politics and Petticoats in the Same Pod: Florence Fay, Betsey Bittersweet, and the Reconstruction of Southern Womanhood, 1865-1868	168	(21)
Anne Sarah Rubin
10 The Confederate Retreat to Mars and Venus	189
Thomas I. Brown