Warring Women

238 Warring Women

Thavolia Glymph. The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 392 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469653631 (cl); 9781469653648 (ebook, 2019).

Shelby Harriel. Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 216 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781496822017 (cl).

Jessica Ziparo. This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal

Workforce in Civil War-Era Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 352 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469635972 (cl); 9781469635989 (ebook).

Carol Sheriff

For more than thirty years, historians have postulated an intimate connection between the American Civil War’s civilian and military spheres, with Drew Gilpin Faust provocatively declaring in 1990, “It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War.”1 While Faust focused on the plantation elite, subsequent historians explored the South’s poorer white women, whose resentment of the Confederacy and the planter elite often led them to aid deserters, evade taxes, or engage in civil unrest. Still other scholars examined the South’s African American women, who engaged in daily struggles to undermine the institution of slavery upon which the Confederacy was founded. Meanwhile, in the North, middleclass women joined benevolent societies to aid soldiers or freed people. Although working-class women joined similar efforts or worked in warrelated industries, some of them opposed conscription, emancipation, or the entire war effort, exposing the tenuous nature of the Union cause too.2 Scholars have argued more recently that the civilian and military spheres were not simply tightly connected but—within the Confederacy, at least— often indistinguishable. Historian Lorien Foote issued a call to arms in 2017: “When historians forsake the binary of the home front and the battlefront and choose instead to explore the various types of conflict generated from households and communities across the South, they will better illuminate people’s diverse experiences of war.”3

Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight rises to the occasion, and then some. While most recent scholarship on Civil War Era women focuses on

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 238–244.

specific regions, classes, or races, Glymph bridges these divides, offering an ambitious overview of women’s wartime battles either to preserve or unsettle the status quo when it came to their households, social standing, legal status, and national identity. Glymph’s book is at once synthetic and, like her previous scholarship, deeply rooted in painstaking archival research. Glymph excels at demonstrating the complex ways in which women’s aspirations often collided with one another as well as with the aspirations of political and military elites—themes that Jessica Ziparo and Shelby Harriel also address, albeit in more focused ways, in their recent monographs.

Glymph argues that we should conceive of the everyday actions of women—African American or white, free or enslaved, rich or poor, southern or northern—as political battles focused on the home, as women struggled “to build free homes or maintain unfree ones as they supported the armies of one side or the other” (14). She divides her book into three sections, each containing two or three chapters focused primarily on a specific group of women. The first section looks at southern women and the second at northern women. The third, “The Hard Hand of War,” returns to the South to examine how the Union’s policy shift toward attacks on Confederate civilians’ morale and property, including their human chattel, affected both white and African American women. The book’s thematic focus on battles for home works better for some chapters than others; Glymph’s most significant contribution may instead be her textured exploration of the complex, sometimes paradoxical interactions among a diverse range of women, including slave mistresses, poor white southerners, enslaved and free African Americans, abolitionists, missionaries, teachers, and aid workers, as well as between women and the men with whom they came face-to-face.

Rather than looking at a singular women’s fight, as her title suggests, Glymph examines a multitude of fights that were happening simultaneously. When elite southern women fled into the country’s interior, they faced resistance from enslaved women and found themselves unwelcome among the poorer white women already living there, with whom they vied for scarce economic resources. In some instances, class warfare erupted into violence, with southern white Unionists and army deserters giving no quarter to the transplanted, condescending planters, who for their part saw poor whites as being of a different “race.” Black-white racial divides proved just as potent, with white women, northern as well as southern, failing to recognize either the full humanity of African American women or their own complicity in perpetuating an inhumane institution. Glymph presents compelling evidence of northern reformers whose positions of privilege rested on investments in slavery-based enterprises, with some of these women also relishing the possibility of assuming the role of “mistress”

as they staffed their own homes with refugees from slavery. In the book’s striking final chapter, Glymph focuses on African American women and children fleeing slavery for the perceived safety of Union lines, highlighting their battles to survive in insalubrious, violent refugee camps. There, they experienced not just neglect, abuse, and sexual assault at the hands of Union forces but also deadly raids by Confederates intent on either re-enslaving or slaughtering them, atrocities so horrific that even some Confederate officers deplored them. Survivors battled the Union’s racist labor policies that deprived them of fair wages, or wages at all, and they fought to reconstitute their families and communities. Meanwhile, when these African American women grew cotton on plantations in the occupied South or paid taxes on their wages, they enriched the Union’s coffers and “helped to keep the war machinery running” (254). Glymph is sometimes, but not always, the first scholar to narrate the many struggles that she deftly recounts; rather, she frames her historiographical contribution as primarily conceptual, one that emphasizes the continuities of class, race, and gender conflicts, and also shows how “the world of the Civil War was at once new and deeply familiar” (11).

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its evocative rendering of historical actors in their full complexity, even in instances when their humanity manifested itself in horrifyingly inhumane ways. Each chapter begins with a gripping vignette that puts human faces on processes that could otherwise seem abstract, and the book is sprinkled with vivid, often chilling testimony from a wide array of primary sources, including slave narratives, Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews, government and military documents, personal correspondence, diaries, and newspapers. The book’s breadth and riveting (if often disturbing) examples make it promising for undergraduate as well as graduate courses.

Despite its wide-ranging nature, Glymph’s book is not designed to be comprehensive. She explicitly omits the West, one of the richest areas of new Civil War-related scholarship, and she makes just passing references to Native peoples, despite the multi-dimensional ways in which struggles for “home” would apply to them. Even within her established geographic confines, her thematic focus on home means overlooking the full range of women’s fights. Although the book is no less compelling as a result, readers interested in certain venues where women fought during the Civil War—for example, in hospitals, factories, government offices, or military regiments—will need to look elsewhere, including Jessica Ziparro’s and Shelby Harriel’s recent books.

Drawing on sources related to three thousand women who applied for and sometimes received employment with the federal government, primarily in clerical positions but occasionally as manual laborers, Ziparo’s This

Grand Experiment chronicles the experiences of mostly middle-class white women who traveled from across the Union to Washington, DC, during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. (African American and poor white women left many fewer traces in the historical record and thus figure less prominently in Ziparo’s account.) The book builds upon historian Cindy Sondik Aron’s Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service (1987) by focusing more squarely on women’s experiences and extending the analysis of their spaces beyond the workplace into homes, neighborhoods, and leisure activities.4 Although Ziparo’s chronological scope is narrower than Aron’s, her book’s focus allows for meticulous, deep research into a wide array of sources—employee records, diaries, government publications, newspapers, the census, court records, and more—covering the long decade (1859–1871) surrounding the Civil War. Ziparo mines these sources for both broader trends and vivid anecdotes, so we learn (for example) that Mary Todd Lincoln used her influence as First Lady to obtain jobs for her psychic medium friends; that the Secretary of the Treasury objected when women workers warmed their teapots on the Department’s stoves and heaters, because—in Ziparo’s analysis—“dozens of teapots dotting the stoves and sills of the Treasury Department feminized [men’s] workspace”; that working women’s housing was short on heat and long on rodents, as one clerk discovered when a mouse burrowed itself in her hairdo; and that among the treasured items that one woman lost to the streetcars’ ever-present pickpockets were “four tickets to an upcoming lecture by Frederick Douglass” (43, 98, 103, 114). Together, such details are suggestive of the book’s broader themes: connections, rather than qualifications, generally determined which women got hired; even though male supervisors applauded women’s hard work and skill, they still conceived of the workplace as fundamentally male; many female workers fought tenaciously to keep their government employment, despite hardships on and off the job; and female workers took advantage not just of the social but also the political opportunities in Washington, discussing the substance of the government documents that they printed or copied for a living, and attending reformers’ lectures and Congressional debates. Women sought such government jobs in droves, and government officials became increasingly willing to hire them, despite no shortage of male applicants. Rather, in the midst of war, there was a shortage of qualified male applicants who were willing to work for government wages, which paled in comparison to what men could make in the private sector. Even though women earned about half of what men did for the same government work, such wages were still substantially better than what women could earn elsewhere, while the work itself sometimes provided welcome intellectual challenges. Although many women sought government work to secure their independence, their ability to obtain jobs generally relied

on the patronage of politically connected men, whose paternalistic appeals on their behalf often emphasized the absence of an applicant’s breadwinning husband or father (due to military enlistment or death) as well as the applicant’s own virtue. While such appeals proved instrumental in landing women jobs, they did not assuage public concerns about the sort of women who worked for the government, concerns stoked by salacious press reports casting female workers as prostitutes. As Ziparo notes, “These two ideas—female employment as charity and female federal employees as morally suspect—complicated how women were perceived in the federal workforce and the jobs supervisors allowed them to do” (68).

Women’s effectiveness on the job nonetheless spoke volumes, helping give serious traction to Congressional efforts to legislate equal pay for equal work among federal employees between 1867 and 1870, when “advocating equal pay for female clerks was not a fringe position” (206). Bills introducing equal pay passed both houses but never became law, although some newspapers published stories announcing, confidently but erroneously, the passage of equal-pay measures. Legislators themselves professed confusion over why equal pay did not come to fruition. Although significant majorities in each house supported the bills, the provision for equal pay got lost in conference committee—a mysterious outcome for equal pay’s proponents at the time and one that Ziparo leaves largely unexplained, despite her otherwise clear, if sometimes repetitive, explanations throughout the rest of the book.

As Ziparo notes, the story that she tells is “not a triumphant narrative” (8). Dependent on male supervisors for their continued employment, women were constrained in their efforts to better their own situations, often playing instead into the tropes of dependency or sociability that men perpetuated. Moreover, with a high turnover rate (most female clerical workers remained on the job for less than a year) and with a highly competitive job market, the opportunities for organization and the inclination toward cooperation were infrequent. On a few occasions, women did unite to strike and petition (sometimes successfully) for higher wages, but they were just as likely to undercut one another in competition for jobs. Even so, Ziparo casts these clerical workers as “labor feminists,” arguing that although they did not work either “consciously or collectively to improve the rights and status of women,” they “were nonetheless challenging prevailing expectations about women’s abilities through their individual examples” (5). Wary of reprisals from supervisors if they joined forces with the suffrage movement, female government workers may have deprived themselves of assistance from activists more familiar with navigating the halls of Congress. At the same time, leading proponents of female suffrage, while supporting equal pay, devoted their limited resources to attaining the vote, which, they believed,

would in turn remedy the unequal pay issue. While Ziparo anticipates readers’ skepticism at labeling the federal employees labor feminists, she does, at a minimum, add her voice to those of other scholars who argue that we must look beyond the suffrage movement for a fuller picture of women’s efforts to achieve equal rights. In the end, she notes, “as women lacked the power and tools to mount a true fight against the discrimination and were dissuaded from collective action, cracks and incremental advances were all they could achieve” (225–226).

Whereas women entering the federal workforce came under intense public scrutiny, women who posed as men and joined the armed forces generally avoided detection, making it hard to estimate their numbers beyond a ballpark range of “hundreds, perhaps thousands,” according to Shelby Harriel in Behind the Rifle (11). Harriel focuses in particular on women who fought as soldiers in Civil War Mississippi, either Mississippians themselves or women from elsewhere whose units saw battle within the state. Although her conclusions largely echo those of DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (2002), Behind the Rifle was a ten-year labor of love for Harriel, a mathematician.5

Like Blanton and Cook, Harriel concludes that in many ways, female soldiers were not so different from their male counterparts. They were ethnically and racially diverse, and they fought for similar reasons: patriotism, economic opportunity, adventure, independence, and vengeance. Some enlisted to be with their male relatives, while others joined the military to escape from overbearing or abusive families or, in some cases, from slavery or prison. Many of these soldiers passed as beardless young men until having their masquerades exposed by misfortune (injury, illness, death), their own intoxicated revelations, their “feminine mannerisms,” or, even, a womanly sneeze (126, 96). Although women’s experiences could vary significantly from their male counterparts’—for example, women captured as prisoners of war generally received lenient treatment—overall their daily experiences outwardly mirrored those of the men alongside whom they marched, camped, fought, and died. Because few of these women left behind their own accounts of their experiences, it is impossible to assess how they experienced the war internally. At least some of these soldiers had also passed as men before the war and some continued to do so after the war, but Harriel concludes that gender identity likely did not motivate biologically female soldiers to present themselves as male (155–159).

Harriel compiles rich information from newspapers, personal and official correspondence, service and pension records, the census, and memoirs. About her contribution to the historical literature, Harriel states that her book “enhances the body of knowledge of women soldiers in general by providing new details of formerly recorded female fighters, debunking some

cases, and introducing previously undocumented ones” (7). Readers with a particular interest in female soldiers will admire and benefit from Harriel’s dogged detective work, which she often recounts in extensive detail as she introduces “over twenty” previously unrecognized female soldiers. But despite her tenacity, her trail frequently runs dry, as we learn time and again that a particular woman’s fate is “unknown” or a “mystery,” or that a female soldier “disappeared from history.” It is especially challenging to discover in the historical record people whose goal was to evade detection in their own time.

Together, these three books advance our understanding of the fragility of the boundary between the Civil War’s military and civilian spheres, not just in the South but also in the North. Glymph’s women often found themselves in war zones, as soldiers or other civilians made battlefields of their homes or their places of refuge, while Unionists and African American refugees aided the Union effort. Harriel’s soldiers and Ziparo’s clerks demonstrate that women saw direct military action and played crucial roles in the bureaucracy that fueled the Union war machine. Three decades after Drew Gilpin Faust mused that it may have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War, historians have increasingly focused on a more racially, economically, and geographically diverse population of Civil War Era women while blurring the line between home front and battlefield. Yet Faust’s basic premise still holds: Women—white and African American, free and enslaved, rich and poor—influenced the war’s military trajectory, even as they fought their own battles for privilege, survival, freedom, family, and home.

Notes

1Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (Mar. 1990): 1200–1228, 1228. 2For a concise overview of the historiography, see Joan E. Cashin, “American Women and the American Civil War,” Journal of Military History 81, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 199–204.

3Lorien Foote, “Rethinking the Confederate Home Front,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 3 (Sept. 2017): 446–465, 460.

4Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).