Gender, sex, and the civil war: battling for inclusion

A historiographical essay interrogating the past quarter century of scholarship examining women's roles during the U.S. Civil War era. Issues of sexuality and sensibilities, morality and masculinity have more and more found their way into the pages of Civil War monographs. Equally significant, questions involving “gender, color and status” have replaced the trinitarian “sex, race and class” to provide a more robust appreciation of the impact of war on American society. Particularly significant, a vibrant literature on African American women – enslaved and free – has expanded definitions and creatively explored intersectionality. Discovering and creating archives, reconstructing the lives of ordinary people, examining the restrictive aspects of gender roles for men and women reshapes our understanding of struggles over citizenship and rights within nineteenth century America. How and why women's bodies became a battleground in mid-century, the legal and medical interventions to demolish female autonomy contribute to an understanding of those restrictions and rebellions stemming from the Civil War all the way into the culture wars of the twenty first century.