The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia by Kristen Brill (review)

Reviewed by: The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia by Kristen Brill Michael T. Bernath (bio) The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia. By Kristen Brill. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 206. Cloth, 75. 00; paper, 35. 00. ) The Weaker Sex in War is a short book with a big argument. Kristen Brill wants to know how women, specifically "middle- and planter-class white Southern women" (5), shaped Confederate political culture and thereby explore the essential relationship between gender and Confederate nationalism. Brill is interested in the ways in which these women contributed to the war, of course, but also how they were appropriated rhetorically by political leaders to advance the Confederate cause. Thus the book deals with both actual and symbolic women, and the role (or complicity) of the former in the construction of the latter. Brill is particularly interested in how female "individuals and organizations" forged "new relationships with Confederate leaders outside of their households, " thus shifting "their focus from their families to the state" (7, 10), from the private to the public. The book is divided into five, case-study-based chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the activities of the leaders of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association (MVLA) during the secession crisis and early months of the war as they attempted to maintain the sacred site's declared neutrality and fend off suspicions of Confederacy loyalty. This would seem an odd way to start the book, as the MVLA very explicitly "did not champion Confederate nationalism" (21), but, for Brill, it serves as an early example of the type of female political engagement that the book seeks to highlight, as the female leadership of the MVLA entered the public political sphere and enlisted male (U. S. ) allies to safeguard a national shrine. More squarely in the Confederacy itself, Chapter 2 examines the Ladies' Defense Association (LDA) and its efforts to raise funds for a gunboat to protect Richmond. Unlike female soldier aid and hospital societies (but like gunboat associations in other southern cities), in their appeals for support, the leaders of the LDA moved beyond women's traditional nurturing role to help bolster the collective military defense of the Confederacy itself. According to Brill, the larger significance of the LDA lay not in the money its leaders raised or the ill-fated CSS Virginia II that came from it, but End Page 269 rather the rhetorical use to which their efforts were put as these women together with male political and media leaders constructed and circulated a narrative of southern female patriotic devotion. Drawing on the language and imagery of "Spartan motherhood, " one that was "socially as opposed to biologically defined" (49), they generated "powerful political capital garnered from women's visible support of the Confederate cause" (52). Chapter 3 centers on the Richmond Bread Riot, but here the focus is not on female organizations or the female rioters, or really the riots themselves. Instead, Brill is interested in how upper-class women reacted to the riots and especially how male political leaders celebrated them as symbolic foils to such lawless disloyalty. Differentiating between the "worthy" and "unworthy" poor, leaders attempted to aid the "worthy" through new policies and attach them to the national cause while at the same time condemn the "unworthy" as dangerous and ungrateful, all in the name of protecting upper-class southern women from these internal threats from below. The fourth chapter examines Virginian women's understanding of and engagement with European (mainly British) politics and the campaign for Confederate recognition, with a particular focus on the international exploits of famed Confederate former spies Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Particularly interesting is Brill's argument that Greenhow, Boyd, and others constructed a humanitarian case for European intervention based on the victimization of southern women at the hands of the United States military as a moral counterargument to the Union's emancipationist war against slavery. The resonance of this argument is difficult to gauge based on the evidence provided, and, of course, the fact that England and France did not intervene meant that it did not achieve the desired end, but that. . .