Home Front Experience and Women’s Political Activism

• In Event: Women, Foreign Policy, and War

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw the first entry of American women into mass political activity. What originated this sudden influx of female political activists? I leverage novel, hand-collected archival data on women’s volunteering during the American Civil War to demonstrate a connection between wartime and peacetime political capacity. Towns where women organized volunteer societies in support of the Union war effort were more likely to have women-led political movements to agitate for temperance, a key issue that mobilized women who previously had little political experience. This relationship is robust to adjusting for other measures of pre-war and wartime social and organizational capital, including male enlistment in the Civil War. I argue that wartime volunteer mobilization helped women gain organizing experience that was useful for mass politics, even in a social context that precluded them from the public sphere and did not involve women directly substituting for male roles (as they did during the first and second World Wars).

Author

• Casey Petroff, University of Rochester