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  • Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War
  • Kristie R. Ross
Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War. Edited by LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8071-3440-5, 272 pp., cloth, $39.95.

Just as the United States ponders sending yet more troops to occupy Afghanistan while withdrawing troops from occupied Iraq, this fine volume of essays, brought together by historians LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, reminds us that all wars are, to some extent, wars of occupation. In the case of the Civil War, occupied regions were peopled largely by women. Contributing to the revisionist trend in military history that goes beyond the clashes of great armies in the field to consider the implications and sustainability of [End Page 190] battlefield outcomes in a particular place, Occupied Women reconfigures the boundaries of the battlefield to include alternative forms of warfare employed by women as they confronted soldiers and officers from opposing armies in their gardens, on their porches, and in their homes. The frequently rehashed battles of the Civil War are not the focus here; neither are the long-term implications of the war for the relative status of women. Instead, the authors hone in on the simmering, sometimes manipulative, occasionally deadly confrontations between partisan women and military personnel as armies move into and attempt to hold hostile territory, what the editors so aptly call the "second front" (3).

Whites and Long have grouped the contributions to Occupied Women into three distinct categories. The first three articles focus on the development and evolution of Union policies regarding occupation. Alecia P. Long reconsiders the historically minimized resistance to Benjamin Butler's infamous "Woman's Order" in New Orleans; Lisa Tendrich Frank describes the female activism uncovered by Sherman's soldiers during their sanctioned invasion of domestic spaces during the 1864 March to the Sea; and, finally, E. Susan Barber and Charles F. Ritter challenge the conventional thinking about the Civil War as a "low-rape" war and expose the official recognition of sexual violence perpetrated against women by Union personnel and the willingness of many women to seek redress through the military justice system (51).

The second group of contributors is more regionally focused. Margaret Creighton, Kristen L. Streater, LeeAnn Whites, and Cita Cook explore the interactions between the occupied and the occupiers as they bumped up against one another in the contested borderlands of the Civil War. From the drawing rooms of Natchez to the kitchens of Gettysburg, women strained to support their partisan loyalties while subjected to the crossfire of contending armies and guerilla bushwhackers.

The third and final section addresses the many layers of gendered occupation. Against a backdrop of blunt military assessments, social upheaval, and the exigencies of war, Leslie A. Schwalm, Victoria E. Bynum, Joan E. Cashin, and Judith Giesberg describe the irregular warfare of diverse groups of women as they negotiated the shifting ground of race, class, emancipation, southern unionism, and the reconfigurations of Reconstruction policy. While many of the women portrayed here were battered by their experience of war, none emerge from these analyses as mere passive victims of either state or military authority. [End Page 191]

The contributors to Occupied Women are at various stages in the development of their ideas, but they all reflect a careful, nuanced, and innovative reading of both traditional and more obscure sources. Take, for example, Barber and Ritter's fascinating explication of Section 30 of the March 1863 Enrollment Act, a legal provision that, in the authors' words, brought "a measure of sexual justice to occupied women" (49). Like Nina Silber and Catharine Clinton's 1992 volume Divided Houses, Occupied Women sets forth a new and exciting research agenda for historians interested in the meaning of gender both during the Civil War and in the attempts to establish a sustainable peace. As the editors underscore in their introduction, their intent is to reconnect women to the many battlefields of the Civil War and to muddy the historically imposed distinctions between the home front and the formal lines of armed confrontation. Indeed, several of the authors represented in...

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