Difference between revisions of "328 2010--Week 2 Questions/Comments"
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I think it is important to keep in mind that literature is largely written for an audience, and yet, this literature is what shapes the public memory of an event. The dominant forms of fiction at the outset of the war were women’s domestic novels. This impacts what type of literature was written during the war. It should come as no surprise that during the war, “the literary marketplace supported an outpouring of popular literature portraying women’s domestic participation in the war.” This domestic participation includes working, sacrifice, and loss, some even argue that the women sacrificed more than the men who were fighting. However, there was a shift in literature with the rise of Civil War veterans organizations. This led to a shift in who were the bearers of the war’s memory from women to veterans. It is amazing how the Civil War has become, “a white male conflict, rather than a cataclysmic event that rent and remade the fabric of life for all Americans.” – Erin Sanderson | I think it is important to keep in mind that literature is largely written for an audience, and yet, this literature is what shapes the public memory of an event. The dominant forms of fiction at the outset of the war were women’s domestic novels. This impacts what type of literature was written during the war. It should come as no surprise that during the war, “the literary marketplace supported an outpouring of popular literature portraying women’s domestic participation in the war.” This domestic participation includes working, sacrifice, and loss, some even argue that the women sacrificed more than the men who were fighting. However, there was a shift in literature with the rise of Civil War veterans organizations. This led to a shift in who were the bearers of the war’s memory from women to veterans. It is amazing how the Civil War has become, “a white male conflict, rather than a cataclysmic event that rent and remade the fabric of life for all Americans.” – Erin Sanderson | ||
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| + | Throughout the reading on the Feminized Civil War, I kept asking myself where the women had gone; it was as if their memory of the Civil War had disappeared entirely. I was pleased when I came across Mary Livermore who, in 1887, spoke out against where the literature about the civil war was going. She argued that the story of Northern women was missing. Then, in 1889 Edward Bellamy, stated that, “many pictures of battles have been painted, but no true one yet, for the pictures contain only men. The women are unaccountably left out.” Finally, there was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps who actually “undermined stereotypes of veterans” and “challenged the veteran dominated culture of remembrance itself.” I was just happy to see that women were not entirely forgotten in the decades following the Civil War. I am curious as to how the majority of women felt when their impacts on the war became largely overlooked, especially after all of the pain and loss that they had experienced. –Erin Sanderson | ||
