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The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century
by Catherine Clinton
Reviewed by Abby Arnold
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The U.S. Women’s Soccer team has received a lot of attention recently, and they deserve it. Their sold-out final game against China in the Women’s World Cup was widely reported to be the largest crowd ever recorded for a woman’s sporting event. The team has been praised for being strong, tough and at the top of their game. There have also been many approving comments on this team’s function as role model, the way the women players inspire young girls. Even advertising has latched onto this redemptive function of the team: a recent Nike ad features a long close-up of an adoring young girl as she watches the team play. Or, at least the audience assumes she is watching the team. We can’t know for sure since the team is never seen in the ad. But that’s okay: what Nike is using to sell its products is that glow on the child’s face (rather than the sweat and pain in the player’s bodies).
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 The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century by Catherine Clinton Paperback - $ 10.40 Published April 1999 Farrar Strau & Giroux |
Clinton shows how the early feminists, in their fight for basic freedoms of education, suffrage and property ownership, used this cultural imperative to their advantage. The access to better and higher education, for example, was presented as a necessity for the children a woman might have, rather than for herself alone. The better educated the mother, the more she could serve her own children. In the nineteenth century, just as is too often still the case today, women who wanted something just for themselves were seen as suspect, selfish, and often dangerous. The fight against this prejudice was huge and still ongoing; the material gains made by the nineteenth century women were substantial.
Clinton’s book is a tremendous achievement, as relevant today, when women’s history courses are a part of the college curriculum, as it was when it was first published in 1984 and women’s studies barely existed. The book, a rather slim volume given the breadth of the history it examines, is an excellent introduction to women’s history. Clinton covers a little bit of everything: slavery, mill workers, voting rights, property rights, sex and religion. She looks at women in the cities and women homesteaders, upper class women and immigrants. With a focus on white women, she still manages to include a good deal about the special circumstances facing black women and the extra demands placed on them both in the slave system and out of it.
If there is one issue that ties the book together, it is the fight for a woman’s right to the vote. The book begins with the exclusion of women from the equality central to the idea of America and ends with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, in 1920. But this story is only the bookend for other, more hidden, parts of women’s history.
Clinton certainly covers the more "common" areas of women’s history: the Abolition and Temperance movements, the mill workers, the opening of women’s colleges and the physical demands of women pioneers. But one of the more interesting areas in the book is Clinton’s discussion of the ways in which women often had to subvert cultural standards to achieve their goals.
The opening of higher education to women so they could teach their children is one such example; another is the way late nineteenth century women, who were not legally allowed either property rights or birth control, used the image of the "passionless" female to give them power in the home in the form of moral and spiritual superiority, as well as justification for the one sure-fire means of birth control, abstinence. These women, who worked within the system, deserve our attention. So do the women whom, in public or in great secret, challenged the prohibitions on women’s lives.
There are the activists who founded groups promoting education, the abolition of slavery, the right to wear trousers and the right to birth control; the reformers who secretly entered brothels to help prostitutes held against their will; the 400-plus known women who posed as soldiers in the Civil War; the women doctors who, after receiving their training in Europe, created medical schools for women in America, as none of the "traditional" schools would have them; the women who fought against the legal practice of clitoridectomy until it finally fell out of use sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century.
My one frustration with Clinton’s book is with its sheer rush of information. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in what she includes, rather I want more of everything. Clinton often covers three or four interesting people and topics per page; she mixes the achievements of large organizations such as the YWCA with the individuals who were part of those groups, like Fannie Barrier Williams, a black member who fought against the hypocrisy of double standards for white and black members.
I want to know more about Ms. Williams, as well as Mrs. E.J. Guerin, a poor widow who, for thirteen years disguised herself as man and, as "Mountain Charley," led wagon trains across the plains and deserts to California. I want to know more about Mary Ames, Emily Bliss, Laura Towne, Ellen Murray and the other women reformers who came to the poorest parts of the South after the Civil War to educate former slaves. In her need to present as much as possible about the achievements of these and hundreds of other formerly anonymous women, Clinton can do little more here than mention their names and move on.
Balancing this lack, the new edition includes an extended bibliographic essay, containing some Internet and electronic resources. The essay is excellent, a much-needed addition to the information presented in the main text.
As an introduction to women’s history, The Other Civil War serves its purpose remarkably well. The book is lively and energetic, crammed with valuable, important and entertaining information, and an excellent place to begin to understand the events and assumptions that still shape the lives of American women today. Whether you think feminism is alive or dead, irrelevant or necessary, the achievements – and failures – of these nineteenth century women still matter.
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