She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War

She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War
Author: Bonnie Tsui
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2006-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1461748496

This exciting new volume profiles several substantiated cases of female soldiers during the American Civil War, including Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (aka Private Lyons Wakeman, Union); Sarah Emma Edmonds (aka Private Frank Thompson, Union); Loreta Janeta Velazquez (aka Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate); and Jennie Hodgers (aka Private Albert D. J. Cashier, Union). Also featured are those women who may not have posed as male soldiers but who nonetheless pushed gender boundaries to act boldly in related military capacities, as spies, nurses, and vivandieres ("daughters of the regiment") who bore the flag in battle, rallied troops, and cared for the wounded. Examining the Civil War through the lens of these women soldiers who fought in the conflict offers valuable insight on existing historical work. This volume will acquaint readers with these women, offering in-depth biographies and behind-the-scenes information. While drawing from recent academic work, Women Soldiers of the Civl War is a lively text geared toward the general-audience reader.

All the Daring of the Soldier

All the Daring of the Soldier
Author: Elizabeth D. Leonard
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393047127

Describes Civil War contributions of women, including soldiers and spies

They Fought Like Demons

They Fought Like Demons
Author: DeAnne Blanton
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2002-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807128060

Popular images of women during the American Civil War include self-sacrificing nurses, romantic spies, and brave ladies maintaining hearth and home in the absence of their men. However, as DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook show in their remarkable new study, that conventional picture does not tell the entire story. Hundreds of women assumed male aliases, disguised themselves in men’s uniforms, and charged into battle as Union and Confederate soldiers—facing down not only the guns of the adversary but also the gender prejudices of society. They Fought Like Demons is the first book to fully explore and explain these women, their experiences as combatants, and the controversial issues surrounding their military service. Relying on more than a decade of research in primary sources, Blanton and Cook document over 240 women in uniform and find that their reasons for fighting mirrored those of men—-patriotism, honor, heritage, and a desire for excitement. Some enlisted to remain with husbands or brothers, while others had dressed as men before the war. Some so enjoyed being freed from traditional women’s roles that they continued their masquerade well after 1865. The authors describe how Yankee and Rebel women soldiers eluded detection, some for many years, and even merited promotion. Their comrades often did not discover the deception until the “young boy” in their company was wounded, killed, or gave birth. In addition to examining the details of everyday military life and the harsh challenges of -warfare for these women—which included injury, capture, and imprisonment—Blanton and Cook discuss the female warrior as an icon in nineteenth-century popular culture and why twentieth-century historians and society ignored women soldiers’ contributions. Shattering the negative assumptions long held about Civil War distaff soldiers, this sophisticated and dynamic work sheds much-needed light on an unusual and overlooked facet of the Civil War experience.

Women at the Front

Women at the Front
Author: Jane E. Schultz
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2005-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807864153

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves. Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.

An Uncommon Soldier

An Uncommon Soldier
Author: Sarah Rosetta Wakeman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 134
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780195102437

Originally published: Pasadena, Md.: Minerva Center, 1994.

Women's War

Women's War
Author: Stephanie McCurry
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674251403

"A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women." --David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass "Readers expecting hoop-skirted ladies soothing fevered soldiers' brows will not find them here...It explodes the fiction that men fight wars while women idle on the sidelines." --Washington Post "As McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a 'people's war' nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people." --James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom "In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war's elemental impact." --Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering The idea that women are outside of war is a powerful myth in western culture, one that shaped the Civil War and still determines how we write about it today. Through three dramatic stories that span the course of the war, this groundbreaking reconsideration invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict for what it was: not just a brothers' war but a women's war. When Union soldiers faced the unexpected threat of female partisans, saboteurs, and spies, long held assumptions about the innocence of enemy women were suddenly thrown into question. Stephanie McCurry shows how the case of Clara Judd, imprisoned for treason, transformed the writing of Lieber's Code, leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Black women's fight for freedom had no place in the Union military's emancipation plans. Facing a massive problem of governance as former slaves fled to their ranks, officers re-classified black women as "soldiers' wives"--whether or not they were married--placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. Finally, Women's War offers a new perspective on the epic human drama of Reconstruction through the story of one slaveholding woman, Gertrude Thomas, whose losses went well beyond the material to intimate matters of family, love, and belonging. Thomas's response mixed grief with rage, recasting white supremacy in new, still relevant, terms.

The Hello Girls

The Hello Girls
Author: Elizabeth Cobbs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2019-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674237439

In 1918 the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France to help win World War I. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges these patriotic young women faced in a war zone where male soldiers resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and ultimately celebrated them. Back on the home front, they fought the army for veterans’ benefits and medals, and won.

Gender and the Sectional Conflict

Gender and the Sectional Conflict
Author: Nina Silber
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469625768

In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war. Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory. Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women--black and white--on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.