The Poster, By Judith Giesberg - 1574 Words

The poster â€Å"We Can Do It† iconizes wartime female patriotism, encouraging women to work in defense industry left by enlisted males and suggesting that females are not isolated from total wars. However, women’s â€Å"intrusion† into the long-assumed male spaces began much earlier than the birth of that poster. Judith Giesberg’s Army at Home demonstrates that the Civil War allowed American women to traverse the social boundaries that reserved wars for males and home for females. Instead, marginalized working-class, rural, minority, or immigrant women actively defied such gender demarcation by replacing males in fields and arsenals, confronting state officials in acquiring resources, joining political activities on streets, or travelling to battlefields to retrieve their loved ones’ bodies (9-10). Challenging the established historiography assuming that only northern middle-class white had political influence and war protests or disruption of the authorities exclusively belonged to the lower class females in the Confederacy, Giesberg innovatively argued that despite spatially distant from battlefields, the long-ignored northern women were actively engaged in politics out of their wartime ordeals (12). She stresses that as the antebellum genderized spaces collapsed during the war, women â€Å"produced spaces where they ceased being the object of and became its subjects† (13). The marginalized northern females thus redefined the lines separating genders ---home versus politics and wars.