The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (review)

Abstract

For more than two decades, literary critics and historians have recovered the work of nineteenth-century women writers. Rather than focus on aesthetic attributes, much of this scholarship emphasizes "cultural work": the ways authors helped construct or subvert the social, cultural, and ideological systems of their day. As her title suggests, Lyde Cullen Sizer belongs to this school. She argues that women of the Civil War era used publication to participate in a political system that excluded them from explicit representation. Moreover, their writings engaged central and emerging divisions within Northern society, even as Union fought Confederacy.