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Monday, December 3, 2012

They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War

I was recently corresponding with Lisa Potocar about her new book Sweet Glory, about a young girl who disguises herself as a man and enlists in a Union regiment with another like-minded female friend.  The subject matter of the novel reminded me of an interesting non-fiction book I had read about female soldiers in the Civil War.  Lisa was kind enough to remind of its name: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War  (#240) by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook.  I felt impelled to go back and re-read this slim volume.

This work deals with why women on both the Confederate and Union sides were motivated to fight, what jobs they performed in their units, how they managed to keep their gender concealed and how some of them were discovered.  These women served with great personal courage and conviction, sustaining wounds and imprisonment and even death.  The authors also document how some of the women fared after the war. 

Since the book is based on records kept by the War Department and Confederacy, as well as regimental histories and personal papers, I wondered why it was that I had never heard of these female soldiers before.  Blanton and Cook help to explain this in what I found in many ways to be the most fascinating part of the book.  Although the vast majority of these women were highly regarded by their fellow soldiers, whether the women's sex was known to them or not at the time, and a great deal was written about them in the press up until the time of World War I, these female soldiers disappear from the histories of the Civil War written post World War I, or are dismissed as aberrations.  It is only very recently that the stories of these women have emerged from the shadows to take their place in the ranks of their fellow veterans.

It certainly does make you pause to think what else might be missing when you read what are considered the definitive Civil War volumes of  the twentieth century.  Now I have to go and give my friend, a well-known Gettysburg expert and miniaturist, heck for never creating a figure of one of the female soldiers who served or fell there....

1 comment:

  1. Peggy,

    First of all, thanks so much for crediting me with your return to and second reading of this book. It's definitely invaluable to anyone looking for research on women soldiers during the American Civil War.

    A very exciting morsel about this subject that I'm sure you'll appreciate: As you know, our country is in the thick of celebrating the Sesquicentennial (say that 10x fast)or 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, which started in 2011 and will continue through 2015 as the individual battles and events arise and are honored. The Washington National Archives has an exhibit which features some of the lesser-known stories during this time, one of them being: women who disguised themselves to fight as soldiers in this war. Imagine my thrill when my story was released within the commemoration period and had to do with a highlight of it. As the saying goes: Timing is everything!

    Thanks also for a fun and entertaining blog on this wonderful book and for being my new "friend" on Goodreads.

    Lisa

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