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....