All the Daring of a Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (review)

352CIVIL WAR HISTORY he identifies the Union officers as being young men who hailed from the westem portion of the state and were "the vanguard of the state's growing white working class" (75). However, after such a promising beginning, the work falters in places. It at times from repetitive themes, and the author often disorients the reader by dropping too many names of officers from various regiments and randomly returning to them later without preamble. In addition, Ruffner seems to lack a clear focus, as he alternates between offering a composite social portrait ofthe junior officers and providing a basic regimental history. In an inherent flaw in his thesis, Ruffner attempts to categorize the junior officers as separate from the enlisted men that they commanded, which is unfortunate . Company-grade officers had a symbiotic dynamic with the enlisted men in their units, and it is difficult to comprehend how a book-length monograph can successfully explore one without examining the other. The author fails to make a convincing case for why the Maryland junior officers deserve a book unto themselves, while a slight condensing ofthe first three chapters would have made an excellent journal article that substantially contributed to the literature on the backgrounds and motivations of Civil War soldiers. Judkin Browning North Carolina State University All the Daring ofa Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 386. $27.95.) In a sector of Civil War literature where many others have sensationalized the already lurid, Elizabeth D. Leonard has instead written a carefully researched and calmly reasoned analysis of the military roles of women. From a wide and skeptical reading in primary materials, especially military records in the National Archives, Leonard has reconstructed the lives of women released from normal gender constraints by the maelstrom of war. Leonard studies what the noted social commentator Mel Brooks once termed the great and the near-great. In addition, to sensible discussions of Belle Boy, Rose Greenhow, Antonia Ford, Elizabeth Van Lew and Pauline Cushman, infamous spies all, Leonard uncovered enough additional women spies to suggest that their numbers and usefulness were far wider than historians had thought. And in addition to exploring the experiences of the five hundred to a thousand young women who passed as male soldiers during the conflict, she also discusses the far larger number of "army women"—relatives, cooks, laundresses and sutlers, who usually have been dismissed as "camp followers." Indeed, in attempting to be fair to such women, Leonard somewhat downplays the number of prostitutes among them; some women played a grater variety of roles than she assumes. BOOK REVIEWS353 Some army women, and not just the cross-dressers, engaged in the war in intense fashion on the field of battle and not merely behind the lines. Several nurses went right into the fray in the sense medics would do in later wars, and a few carried the regimental flag into battle to rally the boys. Some ofthese highrisk takers were rewarded with the semi-official title of "daughter of the regiment ," while a few even were granted honorary commissions. Leonard is the first historian to emphasize such a range of women's modes of participation in the war. As for motivations, Leonard is a realist. In addition to patriotism, Leonard stresses that a steady, if unusual, newjob opportunity of a sort usually denied to them interested many women, many of whom were working class and black. After the war, some were as assiduous in pursuit of pensions as were male veterans. And Leonard also considers the quest for adventure to have been a major motivation. Indeed some notable spies went on the boards after the war, orfictionalized theirown lives in print, which demonstrated both adventurousness and a certain entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps Leonard might have done more with her suggestions about crossdressing and the desire many socially circumscribed young women had to become men. Such fantasies were hardly unusual for adolescent Victorian girls, but the Civil War presented enormous opportunities. Leonard did not have access to much in the way of introspective transsexual consideration, and so this aspect of gender fluidity during war remains less...