Women During the Civil War: An Encyclopedia (review)

Judith Harper's beautifully illustrated new book Women During the Civil War is the first A-to-Z reference volume dedicated exclusively to the experiences of women in the United States between 1861 and 1865. It represents another strong addition to the growing body of recently published historical encyclopedias on women in American history, as well as a major summation of the current state of scholarship on the contributions of women during the Civil War.

Yet Harper's work is hardly just another encyclopedia. For starters, rather than assigning her 128 entries to a variety of scholars, as is usually the case with reference works, she wrote all of them herself. The result is a consistency in style and substance from one entry to another that makes Women During the Civil War a pleasure to read and a reliable resource regardless of whether one is consulting a four hundred or a four thousand word entry. In addition, Harper's work is magnificently produced in an oversized format that showcases a wealth of excellent photographs and maps and includes cross-references, a strong bibliography, a glossary, and both biographical and thematic entries that examine the ways in which women shaped and were affected by the exigencies of the Civil War. Finally, Women During the Civil War includes extensive references to both primary and secondary sources, introductory quotations for many entries that provide context and background information, and entries that deal with women's experiences from both a military and a social perspective. Nurses, spies, soldiers, activists, and farm women are all considered in detail, along with nuns, industrial workers, Native Americans, slaves, Mexican Americans, and the entire gamut of regions, classes, and ethnic groups. Highlights include Malina Pritchard Blalock, who fought for the Confederacy and then for three years with Union forces in North Carolina; Jennie Hodgers, who fought for the Union disguised as Albert D. J. Cashier; and essays on Family Life, Doctors, Girlhood and Adolescence, Government Girls, and, of course, Harriet Tubman and Mary Boykin Chestnut.

Harper's ambitious inclusion of both social and military history prevent her work from being exhaustive, and readers hoping for an exclusively warfare or social-oriented encyclopedia may need to supplement their research by consulting other sources. Still, Harper has done an extraordinary service for general readers and for more advanced researchers alike, for by combining social and military topics in a single work she reminds us of the myriad ties between all of the people and trends of the Civil War era, and how limited our understanding may be if we try too hard to separate events or persons or consider them in isolation.

Women During the Civil War should be a mandatory resource for high school and undergraduate libraries, and will appeal to both general readers and anyone researching the lives of women during the Civil War era. It is endlessly fascinating, and will remain a valuable resource for the foreseeable future.