The Women's Fight

Thavolia Glymph analyzes the many ways that women—white and Black, enslaved and free, North and South—sought to promote or constrain the radical transformations promised by the Civil War. She interweaves well-known stories of white nurses and teachers and northern white feminists who labored to expand their claims on the nation with the lesser-known efforts of free, fugitive, and self-emancipated Black women and poor and working-class white women to ensure that the war led to greater liberty. Even some plantation mistresses became more politically active in efforts to impede Union military campaigns. This powerful book expands our concept of activism, forcing… show more.

Thavolia Glymph is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on emancipation, in particular on how questions of gender factored into this process. In this book, she examines the experiences and viewpoints of women in all of their diversity and complexity—those of Black and white women, slave and free, northern and southern, Unionist and Confederate, and of various social and economic classes—during the U.S. Civil War. Glymph shows that while one can speak of a “woman’s” perspective on the war, it was far more often the case that the lives of individual women were shaped by their loyalties and their particular… show more.

While this book treats the experiences of northern and southern women during the Civil War, it amplifies the too-long neglected voices of poor white and enslaved women in particular. The Women’s Fight is that rare work of historical synthesis that says something new and daring. It breaks down the fictive boundary between the home front and the battle front, demonstrating how real people felt, intuited, and experienced the disruptions of war in disparate ways. Most importantly, it reminds us that the Civil War both displaced people and brought them together in unlikely combinations. Erudite and eloquent.