A Political Tightrope:Mary Elizabeth Massey and Bonnet Brigades Lyde Cullen Sizer (bio) When invited to make this study I first decided what I would not do. I would not romanticize, idealize, or debunk the women of either North or South or attempt to prove or disprove the theses of any school of history. —Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades: American Women in the Civil War, x Elizabeth Massey’s Bonnet Brigades is breathtaking in its scope. Beginning with the work and opportunities of women before the war (excluding, for the most part, enslaved women), North and South, as the war began, she surveys [End Page 415] a remarkably varied terrain including (among others) female nurses, seamstresses, camp followers, writers, lecturers, government clerks, and refugees. She locates women at the battlefront, both in uniform and in camp, escaping their former masters and accompanying their officer husbands. And she locates them on the home front, in dark cold rooms, making do with less. So many of the remarkable books that have emerged from the now-burgeoning field of Civil War women’s history are anticipated here in some form, offering revisions and considerable depth, but following the path that Massey blazed. Coming back to the book after twenty-five years away, I am now struck by the political tightrope Massey walks. Her invitation may not have been explicit on this point, but the occasion would suggest it: this was a moment to emphasize unity between the white North and South, to emphasize what the war cost as well as what it allowed. To walk that tightrope without romanticizing or idealizing represented a kind of political bravery, even as we wince at some of Massey’s choices. Reading her work reveals the imperatives and the nuance of her historical moment and her own complicated sensibility. As much as Massey tried hard to eschew the wrangling, to offer balance and objectivity, she revealed her own ambivalence, her own understanding of the avenues for change, her own sensibility. For Massey, the Civil War was both a tremendous opportunity and a profound tragedy, and she swung back and forth between the two. For women to be “awakened” to a sense of their own possibilities, they needed “a movement . . . which would arouse their emotions, permit them to work with and not against their men, remove them mentally and physically from their narrow domestic world, and challenge them to perform great new tasks and assume new responsibilities.” If all those conditions emerged, such a “movement might do wonders.” Here was the Civil War as possibility, the catalyst for “latent talents.” Still, the end of the war left “many women in all parts of the country destitute, despairing, and embittered.” If the Civil War was a “springboard” to leap beyond the constraints of womanhood, Massey warns, “it is safe to say that in many instances unhappiness, physical breakdown, psychological disturbances, or insecurity were a direct or indirect result of the war.”37 While Massey spends the majority of her attention on the lives of middle-and ruling-class white women, North and South, it is telling that she frames [End Page 416] their lives around their work and argues explicitly and implicitly that freedom from social and cultural constraints must come through remunerated labor or respect given to household labor and attention paid to rural and working-class women. “Of all women’s new activities,” she notes, “none contributed more significantly to her emancipation than increased economic opportunities.”38 Massey’s perspective on radicals or what she called “feminists” was often dismissive. They were few, “dedicated but belligerent visionaries . . . frustrated in their attempt to remake the social order ‘overnight.’” Most women rejected their tactics if not their ideas, viewing them “with indifference, curiosity, derision, disgust, or apathy.” Few, after all, wanted to “listen to harangues on the social injustices, or fight for vague principles.” Antislavery women get short shrift, despite the significance of their work in the lead-up to war. Massey seemed amused by those fighting for dress reform. “Yet one thing could be said for the style,” she wrote: “it brought more humor to the nation than any other feminist cause.”39 When briefly noting the National...
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Apr 2, 2019
Guy S Duke 
Open Access
