Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition

This examination of the women (and men) who served during the Civil War in the U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC), the largest wartime benevolent institution, challenges established scholarship on the history of women's public activism. The author demonstrates that the Civil War generation of women provided a crucial link between the local evangelical crusades of the early nineteenth century and the sweeping national reform and suffrage movements of the postwar period. Drawing on Sanitary Commission documents and memoirs, the author details how northern elite and middle-class women's experiences in and influence over the USSC formed the impetus for later reform efforts. This volume explores the ways in which women honed organizational and administrative skills, developed new strategies that combined strong centralized leadership with regional grassroots autonomy, and created a sisterhood that reached across class lines.