Difference between revisions of "328 2010--Week 2 Questions/Comments"
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(→Alice Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of War, 1861-1900”) |
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'''The author posits that women's suffering was equal to or greater than that of men fighting in the war. Although women suffered great emotional trauma with the loss of their spouses or children, I don't think that you can compare this emotional suffering to what the men were exposed to in battle. They all suffered in their individual way, but the emotional and physical toll the men faced daily cannot be compared to that of women's suffering back home.'''-efritz | '''The author posits that women's suffering was equal to or greater than that of men fighting in the war. Although women suffered great emotional trauma with the loss of their spouses or children, I don't think that you can compare this emotional suffering to what the men were exposed to in battle. They all suffered in their individual way, but the emotional and physical toll the men faced daily cannot be compared to that of women's suffering back home.'''-efritz | ||
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| + | While reading I found it interesting that women’s literature disappeared and “a newly masculinized literary marketplace” took place AFTER the Civil War. The literature in stories, essays, novels, poems, songs, newspapers, and magazines switched from primarily focused on the personalities, suffering, and trials of women to focus on the “real” or “actual” experience of the people during the War; that which men had during the battles, who the people where, (specifically generals), and the deaths /problems during the war. In addition to this we must remember who the media of the period are appealing to; the women during the Civil War were the only ones left at home to receive and read these magazines, so they would appeal to them first and foremost and then to the men once they came back from war. | ||
| + | When the men came back from war, they came back into their dominating role of society. In response to this fact, the media began to print articles about what they thought would be appealing to the men that came home, “The Century magazine, begun in 1881, published its famous battles and Leaders of the Civil War series from November 1884 until November 1887.” These were stories of their battles and the trials they, the men, had faced. I don’t think that when the men came home they wanted to hear about how much the women in their lives had suffered, but what they had suffered to bring freedom to their country and the women in it; the feel heroic and that they had survived. | ||
| + | I also found the argument between the portrait of women encouraging the men to enlist and the effect of suffering because of sacrificing their men. Samuel Osgood explains his figure of women as “the good mother seated at the window from which floats the household flag, and watching intently the passing regiment and waving her handkerchief to some friend of kinsman…the nation seems to live in the person of this queen.” These women, especially mothers, appropriate roles are to sacrifice their sons and husbands for the good of the nation and, in this depiction, revel in their position in the military. “The patriotic mother and her daughter became a way of imagining personal obligation to the state.” In contrast, the picture of women suffering for their men is a truer reality than that of being happy during the war. Louise Chandler Moulton’s 1863 “One of Many” wrote “Is it not true that every bullet shoots double, and the shot which flies farthest makes the sorest wound?” In this sense a women is “wounded for far longer and far worse that the pain that the solider felt as he died and left her. I feel that Fanny Fern summed it up best in writing that she “who is giving her husband to her country, has given everything.” ---Morgan | ||
== Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865-1880” == | == Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865-1880” == | ||
