The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation by Thavolia Glymph (review)

Reviewing the literature on women in 2002, Thavolia Glymph concluded that “the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the most racially gendered and regionally segregated historiographical space in US history.”¹ Civil War scholarship has made great, corrective strides since then. Scholars are removing the blinders that prevented our seeing when geography mattered less in women’s lives than race or class. The field is a whole lot less “battle-centric” than it once was, with few insisting that sharp lines marked the separation of battlefield from home front (217). It is fitting that Glymph’s new book seeks to further the work of breaking down the boundaries that still separate scholarship on black and white women, North and South, wealthy and poor.

But it does more than integrate. The Women’s Fight stakes out new scholarly ground, arguing that black women’s labor—overlooked, coerced, dangerous, and often unremunerated—was central to the U.S. Army’s success in the field. And, in highlighting how various women’s war “business”—slaves’, white slave-owning refugees’, poor southern whites’, and abolition-minded white northern volunteers’—brought them “colli[ding]” into one another, Glymph shows what was at stake for women whose “business” was ending slavery and for those who benefited from its perpetuation (2, 259). Whereas some scholarly distinctions seem no longer meaningful, this one remains essential in understanding women’s Civil War.

Less clear are the book’s claims about the “home” referenced in the subtitle; this may be because no home was safely beyond the reach of the Civil War—at least none of those featured in the book. The Women’s Fight begins with white slaveholding women on the road as refugees, seeking to get themselves and their slave property beyond the reach of the U.S. Army. During their journey, they suffered some of the privations—dirt, cold, hunger—faced by the enslaved people who had been force-marched to the cotton frontier decades earlier. Things didn’t get any better for them once they made new homes in mountain communities in western North Carolina or the South Carolina upcountry, where their poor white neighbors did not welcome them and the airs they put on. Who wants new neighbors showing up and eating up meager food reserves? Particularly those who thought the local women were simply “ungrateful wretches,” as did Gertrude Clanton Thomas, or “corn women,” as did Mary Rhodes, when they came looking for help feeding their families (70, 74). Yet, when the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands arrived late in the war, women who had fled the Union army to protect their property in slaves were made over into “homeless Union refugees,” becoming the “refugees” in the bureau’s name and the recipients of Yankee sympathy and largesse (85).

Not so the bureau’s “freedmen”—or, rather, the enslaved women who were left to make their freedom when slaveholding women fled. Enslaved women are the Civil War’s forgotten Unionists, “an undrafted, unwanted army of black women” who “shored up the antislavery ground” on which the U.S. Army would fight (97). Everyone knows that the 180,000 black men, most of them enslaved, who served in the U.S. Colored Troops provided a crucial boost for the Union war effort, entering the fight at a time when the army was stretched thin and in need of fresh recruits. Glymph’s “army of black women” can now join them in the scholarship on the won cause.

Glymph previewed some of her thinking on black Unionist women in an essay in this journal’s September 2018 issue; here the subject gets a fuller treatment. Glymph reaches deep into a number of primary sources, including the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Federal Writers’ Project interviews...