Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War is a collection of essays pertaining to the crisis in gender relations that accompanied the Civil War in America. As a collection, the essays present a narrative that chronicles the various impacts on gender that affected men and women, the North and the South, as well as slaves and non-slaves. What emerges is a cohesive body of text that is informative, illuminating, and instructive. The themes most explored in this volume are those of empowerment through abolitionism. In The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender Relations by Leann Whites, the two groups most perceptive of the gender crisis were Northern feminists and black abolitionists. During the Civil War, the public status of motherhood increased. This leads to another theme that will later be explored in following essays, that of the State as family. In this first essay, Leann Whites argues that the Civil War created circumstances for gender equality, both diminishing white Southern male masculinity and increasing black manhood. Ideas of manhood during the Civil War are further investigated in Part II and in Reid Mitchell's Soldiering, Manhood, and Coming of Age: A Northern Volunteer. The journey from civilian to soldier was mirrored in the transition from boyhood to manhood, and the constitution of manhood evolved as a delicate balance of masculinity and manly restraint. During the Civil War, the body politic as well as the army assumed familial ties to facilitate solidarity. Despite the changes in notions of manhood, for the black male population the "empowerment" was not always beneficial. Jim Cullen's Gender and African-American Men details how conceptions of black manhood changed during the Civil War, with the mastery over one's own body leading to mastery in warfare. Despite being placed on some of the most dangerous fronts, black soldiers endured low pay and high disease in exchange for their mastery over their bodies. In Part III of Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, the themes move from issues of manhood to those relating to women. In Arranging a Doll's House: Refined Women as Union Nurses author Kristie Ross writes about female volunteers on hospital transports, and she draws from the familial theme by presenting the hospital transport as the rearrangement of a doll's house to appear domestic. Ross also reveals a sense of agency for women volunteers, claiming that many felt "...an eagerness to seize an occasion to escape the routine pattern of their lives and a familiarity with genteel standards of household organization." (101) Lyde Cullen Sizer's Acting Her Part: Narratives of Union Women Spies also deals with the issue of female agency during the Civil War, but Sizer further examines the repercussions women felt depending on whether they were white or black. For white women spies, their efforts were more dramatic than substantial, whereas for black abolitionists like Harriet Tubman the cause and consequences of being a spy were much more realistic. Sizer's essay is also an attempt to place female spy narratives in a literary context from which they have been excluded. Of all the essays in Divided Houses, none is more colorful and titillating than Michael Fellman's Women and Guerrilla Warfare. Through his dramatic prose, Fellman explores how peacetime morality was subverted through guerrilla warfare, with male guerrilla fighters attacking traditional values while physically attacking women. Fellman, doubtless, is presenting a form of psychological history by claiming "there was also an additional element here of bad boys acting out against a nagging, smothering mother." (151) For many Kansas guerrilla regiments during the Civil War, the "freeing" of slaves was an act of defiance rather than a moralistic pursuit. Guerrilla warfare finally reinforced the need for love, security, and family. The fourth part of Divided Houses closely examines dynamics on the Southern homefront. Peter Bardaglio's The Children of Jubilee: African-American Childhood in Wartime explains how prior to the Civil War, slave children were age-segregated but not gender-segregated. With freedom as a concept first emerging for many slaves during the Civil War, play activities among children became more gendered. Martha Hodes's Wartime Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White Women and Black Men further draws on the theme of black male power as a political issue emerging during the Civil War, which consequently led to sexuality itself becoming a political issue. With most yeoman farmers at war, the homefront became a location for "illicit" sex as well as the performative stage for class discord. The Southern states were not the only ones to feel the impact on gender relations that the Civil War created: Part V examines gender issues on the Northern homefront with Patricia R. Hill's Writing Out the War: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Averted Gaze. In Part VI, essays examine how the politics of Reconstruction became gendered, with Northern women beginning to campaign for the vote and new labor opportunities for African-American men and women. In spite of these advances, however, the ruling classes in the South still attempted to exert authority and black women were still subjected to southern white male violence, as evidenced in Catherine Clinton's concluding essay, Reconstructing Freedwomen. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War is a combination of various historiographical methodologies; cultural, social, psychological, intellectual and political, which simultaneously present a coherent and evocative study of wartime's affect on gender relations. In addition to mapping themes in gender relations during war, narratives of women's undertaking of professional and managerial duties while men were fighting in the Civil War provides a historical anchoring of the themes of female labor that were to arise again during the First, and especially Second, World War.