Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War

Patriotic Toil. Northern Women and the American Civil War. By Jeanie Attie. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xvi, 294 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-8014-2224-8.)

A groundbreaking study of Northern women's work during the Civil War, Patriotic Toil significantly revises our understanding of the meanings of Civil War home front activism. Ever since George Fredrickson's superb Inner Civil War (1965), historians have assumed that the Civil War promoted a new ethos of centralization, organization, and bureaucratization in American national life. Certainly the leaders of the United States Sanitary Commission (ussc) whom Fredrickson studied, including Henry W Bellows, encouraged this instrumental vision of their work both during and after the war.

But by delving deeply into the rich resources of the ussc papers, including an extensive home front correspondence from local women, Jeanie Attie complicates this story in fascinating new ways. Far from the...