Dr. Nina Silber, author of Daughter of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War and Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, offers a complex account of the changes in activity and attitude of women in the north with an eye toward a comparison between the north and the south. During the Civil War, women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort—bringing women more firmly into the civic sphere and ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.