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

For the past decade and more, scholars have been discovering, uncovering, and recovering hidden histories of women's experiences, place, and consequence in the American Civil War. At one time relegated to the sidebars of Civil War studies, women now often share center stage with men and have attracted scholars of many stripes who examine women in varied circumstances and contexts—as, for example, Southern plantation mistresses beset by war, enslaved black women seizing freedom during the war, Northern white women mobilizing relief and other services trying to ameliorate the war, and Southern white women memorializing their men to rewrite history after the war. Much of this work, however, has focused on women in a particular location or region, or of one class or race, or in a specific wartime or postwar activity. Not surprisingly, too, much of the literature has followed the lives and doings of women who left written accounts, giving them voice and also primacy in telling the stories of the women's war. What the scholarship has lacked is a work that pulls together the many histories we do know of particular women and experiences while also finding and relating those of women still on the margins of historical inquiries, such as poor white women. In The Women's Fight, a work stunning in its sweep and sobering in its argument, Thavolia Glymph has mined public and private records prodigiously and aggressively to make the case that the war was an all-consuming women's fight that affected every aspect of their, and thus too their men's, lives and defined the meanings of home, freedom, and nation for that generation and later ones.

The brilliance and beauty of Glymph's book is her deft weaving of personal stories into a larger canvas showing how women of all classes, colors, and conditions caught up in war made their ways in it, but with no single response that fit all. The women's fight did not bring women together on the basis of sex as much as it often set them against one another, and even their men, based on their racial, class, regional, and family identity and interest. Thus, for example, Glymph follows plantation mistresses fleeing to the upcountry to avoid Union army advances and expecting the non-slaveholding women there to embrace them in common cause by sheltering and feeding them, when in fact class differences and circumstances separated the demanding expectations of the slaveholding women from the hardscrabble realities of the poor women. In that process too, as Glymph details, the rigors of being refugees reduced slaveholding women to begging and becoming more like those they enslaved as they scraped by for food and suffered for want of shelter. At the same time, enslaved black women seized the moment to run, walk, or otherwise move to "freedom," whether in contraband camps or setting up on their own. But even as they asserted their freedom, most discovered the limits of it as Union officers and then Northern agents of freedmen's aid organizations set them to work on plantations and pushed them to dependences supposedly suitable for their sex, race, and former condition. Glymph points to the persistence of racial stereotypes even in the face of black women's genius and grit in surviving bondage and protecting their families, as, for example, in Northern white female teachers who patronized blacks as being almost hopelessly dehumanized by slavery and incapable of their own uplift, or Northern white women, from families that had gained their wealth from the profits of slavery, who sought to set themselves up as new plantation mistresses with black servants. These and many other examples of women experiencing war show at once the intersections of women's lives and the diversions and divisions of women's interests. Glymph also reveals how concepts of...