Oppression by Omission: Women Soldiers Who Dressed and Fought as Men in the Civil War
brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/28/women-...Posted Feb 28, 2013, 1:16 PM UTC
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brainpickings.org
Did people read a different article than I did? I thought it was an article about a book detailing a facet of Civil War history that practically no one knows about. I have a B.A. in History, and while my focus was not American History, I did take a few classes that focused on that era. I don't recall ever discussing women serving secretly in the Civil War and only discussing women's roles on the domestic front in regards to war.
While I do think this article plays fast and loose with the definition of 'oppression', I can certainly see their point in using it. Compare this to the long held omission in historical texts of blacks who contributed to and served in the Civil War. That has also been attributed to oppression of blacks. This really isn't any different in that respect (note, I am not comparing the overall oppression of blacks to any type of women's oppression). Omitting a group of a population's contributions to any major historical event can be viewed as a form of oppression by omission, especially when one group is celebrated for their contribution at the expense of the other.
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I don't recall ever discussing women serving secretly in the Civil War and only discussing women's roles on the domestic front in regards to war.
Why would you have? There are fewer than three hundred instances known, as far as I know. One soldier in ten thousand.
It's a curious tidbit, and interesting and valid to look at in its own right, but it's really an anomaly, not necessarily important in understanding the war as a whole.
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Several commenters didn't even understand that the 'oppression' was about the omission of the women's stories, not what the women themselves faced. If you can't get past the a title then you aren't that serious a history student and probably should head back to r/entertainment.
The blog post is not without faults. It would have been better to let the women's stories and motivations speak for themselves and leave out the cliche gender politics angle. Sometimes stories get swept into the cracks because they are very-niche and it takes awhile for an author to discover, care, and write about it.
The book itself sounds fascinating.
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I agree with everything you said except:
leave out the cliche gender politics angle.
You can't study these individuals' stories without discussing gender politics of the period, nor can you ignore the gender politics of today, since those politics serve to reinforce the silencing of their stories.
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I don't think I agree with you, at least not as far as saying one "can't" write about people's lives without projecting a modern political narrative onto it.
One can study these women as individuals who made an interesting and unorthodox choice for a variety of personal reasons or one can lump them together into a "Rosie the Soldier" feminist-hero archetype.
since those politics serve to reinforce the silencing of their stories
I'm not sure I agree with this either. I don't think these women's stories were 'silenced' as much as they were ignored and forgotten until someone decided to explore it.
There's a difference between having a system actively work to silence authors and not having authors who are interested in the topic. Luckily some historians were interested enough to explore and write about these women soldier's forgotten stories.
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In the profession of history being "ignored" is part of the archival "silencing." See Trouillot's book Silencing the Past for an excellent (though slightly dated) analysis of this phenomenon. Although Trouillot is dealing with Haiti, which is perhaps the most egregious occasion of oppressive archival silencing, his introduction explicitly ties his methodology and theoretical framework to other historical instances of oppression via silencing.
A lot of Natalie Zemon Davis' work comes to mind as well.
There's a difference between having a system actively work to silence authors and not having authors who are interested in the topic.
The system, however, HAS actively worked on silencing these individuals through the creation and exaltation of the archive. That's the point of Trouillot's book. One can't look at subaltern peoples and escape this maddening and profoundly deafening silence. The oppression is encoded directly in the historical record. Unfortunately, the historiography of the late 19th/early 20th century, during the professionalization of the field, not only preserved these silences, but in some ways exacerbated them. The methodological presumptions of early historians actually DID silence these subaltern peoples.
Take, as an example, the Carte Nativorum of 13th-14th (compiled in 15th) century England. It is a record of nominally illegal land transactions among unfree peasants. According to the normative archive (as constructed via legality and bureaucracy), this document should not exist. Indeed, it sat on a shelf until the 1930s when it was picked up during a conversation between historians, yet they agreed that there was no possible way it could exist, so it must be a mistake.
It took another 30 years before a critical edition and a single explanatory essay were compiled and published. To date there has only been a little bit of work done on these charters (which are peculiarly "normal," all things considered). Is it because no one was "interested in the topic?" Partly I suppose, research into villeins (unfree peasants) and their exercise of power and agency is only a relatively recent phenomenon (Dr. Maitland, a powerhouse of English legal history writing in the late 19th century, sort of took for granted their servile position); however, something larger is going on here about the power of an archive, the power of the profession, and the assumptions and aims of each.
The point I'm making here is not that we should be "projecting a modern political narrative onto" these sources, these people, and their experiences. That is, actually, extremely far from my own methodology and theory, especially considering the fact that I'm a left-wing radical atheist who studies the medieval period; to project my own politics, metaphysics, and social views would be the height of conceit, and it is something I take very great pains to avoid. I actually constantly advocate against what Brad Gregory astutely called "a displaced autobiography."
Rather, what I am advocating is an understanding of the historicity of both archive and historian. These women (and I use that word with all due caution, as I do not know their genders) have been ignored by history, both larger archival and the profession. That exclusion effectively silenced their voice, actions, and, ultimately, their agency. This silencing is the product of several factors, one of which is the construction of gender politics within mid-19th century America and the other is the construction of gender politics within the intervening century and a half. There are obviously more factors at play here regarding their exclusion from the historical record and the historical narrative (two different things of which we should always be careful to be aware), but to deny the contingencies of gender politics that surround the discussion is to deny its oppressive power, an equally dangerous proposition.
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A useful indicator I look for in these comments is how sarcastic they are. I haven't seen that many interesting AND sarcastic comments here.
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If anyone's interested, I read a book on the subject by a woman named Sophia Johnson who joined the war disguised as a man in order to track down her brother. She even got shot and had to lose an arm. I think it was called The Friendless Orphan or something along those lines.
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I hope this is not too off-topic, but I can't recommend Pratchett's [Monstrous Regiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_Regiment_(novel\)) highly enough. It deals with the same topic: a girl that wants to join the army.
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To pass as a man, Union soldier Frances Louisa Clayton, who enlisted with her husband in 1961, took up gambling, cigar-smoking, and swearing.
TIL the civil war was in the 1960s.
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Yeah I'd hate to be oppressed by being prevented from dying and killing other people in the bloodiest event in American history.
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Oh the humanity.
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i own that book. great read! i have no idea why this is framed in the context of oppression though. it's not like it was a secret that women had fewer rights than men back then.
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In the Oppression Olympics it is best to enter into as many events as possible if you want to win.
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I wouldn't have chosen the word "oppression" either. Technically, one could use it, but to me it reduces the power of the word to address actual oppression.
Women were oppressed during the time, but saying that overlooking these 250 - a possible 1,000 (Blanton gives this number in the book, 250 were actually discovered, they gave a guess at additional numbers that were not) is oppression, seems to be a stretch. Almost like saying the sun oppresses me by burning my skin when I'm outside. :P
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*The War of Northern Aggression.
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Yes folks, this is oppression. Denying people choice, denying them agency, that's oppression. Free people have the right to make choices, even choices that might be seemingly detrimental to themselves, denying them that right is denying their freedom.
Like seatbelt and bicycle helmet laws. I am oppressed that my government doesn't allow me to make the choice for myself to be unsafe.
Seriously it's a form of oppression, but I wouldn't go so far as to make a huge deal out of it because there is some very serious and grave forms of oppression out there and we shouldn't wantonly toss the term around.
In this article's case, sure it's oppression, but on the scale of oppression it's really not that bad. Let not wear the term out and rob it of its meaning.
No, you're just being ridiculous.
It's called satire, son. Johnathan Swift was being ridiculous when he wrote A Modest Proposal, but he still had a point.
What is your point? I read your comment a few times and I couldn't parse out what you're saying.
Do you mean to say that preventing one gender from serving their country is not oppression?
Men that are not physically fit to serve are being "oppressed" to this day. Few women are, and too big of a hassle to enlist them. Also rape.
So where do you stand on letting 8-year-olds smoke, or do we only earn our "freedom" at some arbitrary age of majority?
Are you comparing grown women to 8-year old children? Seriously??
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I'm losing respect for the feminist movement from all the propaganda on reddit. So fucking what that women couldn't serve openly in the civil war. They should have been allowed to have bank accounts and shit but making this story about how women have been oppressed rings hollow to me when at the time our country had millions of SLAVES. Those people were oppressed. But what do I know. I'm just a white cis male patriarchal oppressor. Fuck me right?
Interesting how black men had the right to vote before any woman did. Tell me again about how the oppression of women during the 19th century wasn't significant.
Also, what the absolute fuck are you doing in r/history if you're going to shit all over history??
“Women lived in germ-ridden camps, languished in appalling prisons, and died miserably, but honorably, for their country and their cause just as men did.”
Some women did while hundreds of thousands of men did. Tell me again how women were so oppressed by being kept out of the most brutal conflict in American history. I will add my shit to the pile if I want. So stop oppressing me, shitlord. I'm just presenting my opinions. It's good reddit is full of white-knights like you to protect all the weak-minded anons out there in this racist, homophobic, misogynist, pedophile infested den of free thinking.
Not allowing people to make the choices that they want to make? You don't see how that's oppressive?
SRS is here follks.
Look out! Women are angry that someone posted something offensive to women! The horror!!
How dare women object, when we marginalize them?!
Firstly, one article on this doesn't mean that all the other oppression present at this time was unimportant. This is just another facet being shown, there is no claim that it is the only oppression or even the most important. Secondly, please don't take what you see of feminism on reddit or other parts of the internet as representative of the feminist movement as a whole. Overall the feminist movement is far less radical and extreme than what you see on here, in many ways due to backlash similar to yours. This of course has led to formation of radical feminist groups (coughSRScough), and, especially on the internet, those get more attention than more mainstream feminism.
Extremists always steal attention and shed a negative light on their organization/movement/affiliation/whatever.
I'm confused, who is stealing attention away from what?
Thanks for writing that. I have the idea that reddit concentrates certain personalities at times and I shouldn't let them represent others. It is just so pervasive at times. So, thanks again.
It's the classic liberal dilemma: you're either tolerant of everyone, or you're not. It doesn't matter which "side" current society has deemed to be "in the right" on any given issue, you're still a bigot if you are prejudiced against a certain group and their rights.
I'm not religious; I'm not very socially conservative; but I think that those who are have the right to believe whatever the hell they want to believe. I don't think those beliefs should be the basis for law affecting others' choices, but I also don't think they should be vilified to the tremendous extent they have been lately.
There are a very few common-sense social norms that everyone can pretty much agree on (several Commandments among them) and everything else comes down to personal opinion. Democracy's inherent failure is in the notion that the 51% somehow has a more valid right to their position than the 49%.
What point are you trying to get across exactly? You're all over the board with that comment
In the states, that wasn't meant to be the case. The constitution is pretty explicit about protecting minorities from the majority.
Hello r/history,
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Amen