They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (review)

Exhaustively researched by the authors and their formidable team of research assistants, They Fought Like Demons is both an excellent read and an innovative, significant contribution to Civil War scholarship. DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook have documented 250 cases of "distaff" soldiers—namely, women who disguised as and fought as men—and the book demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that these female soldiers displayed martial skill and valor on the battlefield and therefore deserve a share of the respect and honor that Americans have bestowed on male veterans of the Civil War.

The book is a treasure trove both for non-specialists (the general public and college students) and for experts on the Civil War as well. Those in the former category will find the book to be admirably "user-friendly." After leading with an eye-opening chapter that shows that women participated as soldiers in the major engagements and campaigns of the war, the authors organize subsequent chapters thematically, and display at every turn an uncanny knack for anticipating, and then answering in clear and forthright prose, the reader's questions:

What was the background of female soldiers and what motivated them to enlist and to fight? They were predominantly of working-class, immigrant, farming or frontier backgrounds, Cook and Blanton reveal, and they were motivated by much the same considerations as their male counterparts—by patriotism, a yearning for glory, a desire to be with their loved ones, and by the economic boon that a soldier's salary represented.

How were they able to maintain their disguises? Passing as a man was not as difficult as a modern reader might imagine. The nature of camp life—the fact that soldiers slept in their uniforms, almost never bathed, and used the woods as their sanitary facilities—served to facilitate women's subterfuges.

Were women soldiers promoted, wounded, captured? Yes on all counts—indeed Cook and Blanton are able not only to furnish anecdotes about women's combat exploits but also to generate statistics. For example, women soldiers suffered a casualty rate of 44 percent and a promotion rate of 14 percent.

What became of those who were, due to injury or accident, detected? Surprisingly, there was a wide range of official responses. While most such women were discharged, others were allowed to remain in the ranks. Indeed the Confederacy was so starved for "man" power that it proved more likely than the Union to permit women to continue their military careers after detection.

How did the public regard "distaff" soldiers? Here, too, Cook and Blanton relish surprising the reader. From the immediate aftermath of the war well into the early twentieth century, the public was kindly disposed to women soldiers and had an insatiable appetite for stories about them. Cook and Blanton explain that it was only in the 1920s, as the last Civil War veterans were dying off and as the "inevitable cultural backlash" against the success of the woman's suffrage movement was setting in, that women soldiers came to be seen through the Freudian lens of sexual abnormality, as individuals who were unstable and indecent. Such disparaging attitudes about women in the military have persisted, and explain why female soldiers have been overlooked by so much modern-day Civil War scholarship.

Cook and Blanton are able to render women soldiers visible and to judiciously assess their combat records because they have dug much deeper into the historical record than other authors. Civil War specialists will particularly appreciate the ways that they have fleshed out the stories of relatively well known soldiers such as Loreta Janeta Velasquez and Albert Cashier; those stories turn out to be much more complicated and interesting than previous works have suggested.

For all of its strengths, the book's large cast of characters and thematic...