Civil War and its Impact on Sexual Attitudes on the Homefront

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CIVIL WAR AND ITS IMPACT ON SEXUAL ATTITUDES ON THE HOMEFRONT

Gender relationships and sexual behavior were well prescribed throughout much of the nineteenth century. White men controlled the economic, legal, and political structure of the nation. Women could not vote; their educational opportunities were limited; and few women held jobs outside the home. Married women by law, tradition, and faith were considered inferior to their husbands and could not lay claim to their property, wages, or children (in rare cases of divorce). Women were supposed to uphold the moral values of the nation and to behave in a virtuous, pious manner. Their primary role was to care for their families and homes rather than to engage in the rough and tumble of public life. The double sexual standard prevailed, giving men but not women the ability to transgress sexual boundaries without serious repercussions. Before and after the Civil War, medical advisors published numerous tracts that presented dire consequences if any woman became "unsexed" by acquiring too much education or overstepping her social and legal boundaries.

Yet society and sexual behavior did not always function as prescribed. Many poor women had to work for wages in order to survive. Not all women were virtuous; prostitution was a problem in cities, army camps, and western towns and mining camps. White males took sexual advantage of slave women. Female slaves and poor farm women could not conform to ideal female behavior since they often worked in fields and performed what many whites considered to be masculine tasks.

With the woman's rights and abolition movements in the late 1840s, a few northern women became more political and outspoken. A handful of them were soundly criticized for challenging prevailing fashion and donning "bloomers," or pants, that allowed them to discard corsets and tight lacing. Utopian communities that sought to create a more perfect society offered alternate forms of sexual behavior. Shakers insisted that men and women live apart and forgo sexual intimacy, and the Oneida Community promoted "complex marriages," permitting sexual relations between any man and woman in that community. The Mormons allowed polygamy.

During the Civil War, traditional gender roles underwent significant change. Women made major contributions in the war, demonstrating their effectiveness as battlefield nurses (a profession that had been male), and a few even dressed as soldiers and engaged in armed conflict. Female spies' records of daring matched that of their male counterparts. A number of women worked in factories and government offices. Women on the homefront took charge of their farms and families. These examples suggest that rather than being innate, the capabilities of the sexes depended on social and cultural circumstances.

The active roles that women assumed in the Civil War—due to necessity, desire, or a combination of both—worried Americans who were bound by strict ideas of proper gender and sexual behavior. They feared that masculine behavior by women would carry over into the postwar period, making those women unfit wives and mothers. Whereas some Americans understood that such women were acting out of necessity and appreciated what they did during wartime, they believed that women should assume male roles only in dire emergencies. The general opinion was that men should protect and defend women.

Of course, the Civil War fostered prostitution in both cities and army camps. Often prostitutes in camps also filled conventional female roles. They cleaned for the men, did laundry, cooked, and performed other domestic services. Many soldiers wrote rather sympathetically of these women, whom they viewed as having been forced into prostitution as a result of the exigencies of war.

An improved situation after the Civil War was experienced by African American women. With freedom and the legality of their marriages assured, black women were less likely to become victims of white men's sexual needs. The end of slavery in 1865, however, made whites nervous, and a number of northern and southern states banned marriage and sexual relations between people of different races (miscegenation). Nevertheless, coercive sex between members of the dominant white race and any subordinate race continued into the twentieth century.

As might be expected, a reaction set in after the Civil War against what the public perceived as a loosening of moral standards. In the 1870s, New York City's Anthony Comstock and his Purity Crusade against "smut" sought to suppress pornography, abortion, contraception, and prostitution. Comstock and his followers encouraged the passage of state and local laws against prostitution and abortion as well as federal laws against the selling and importation of contraceptives and the mailing of obscene literature. However, opposition to these laws also arose. Counter movements challenged the nation's ideas of appropriate sex roles and sexual behavior. Americans of this era also worried about what they perceived to be the feminization of men and viewed aberrant male sexual behavior, such as masturbation and homosexuality, as an illness. Churches, Sunday schools, and male organizations such as the YMCA offered activities to foster masculine behavior.

Every major war has affected America's views on gender and sexual relationships. War provides an opportunity to both reassert and question basic assumptions about the roles of men and women. The Civil War was no different in that regard. However, just as it differed from other wars in fundamental ways, so, too, was its effect on male-female relationships appreciably greater.