Thavolia Glymph. The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. Littlefield History of the Civil War Era Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 392 pp. Ill. $26.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4696-5365-5; $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5363-1.
Reviewed by Shae Smith Cox (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Published on H-Nationalism (July, 2020)
Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera (University of Arkansas - Fort Smith)
Adding to the ever-growing list of Civil War studies focusing on the contributions and sacrifices of women, Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight details the “women’s fight across the divides of space, race, and class as they moved into each other’s worlds” in varying capacities (pp. 4-5). Setting the stage for the book, Glymph poignantly states that the “war exposes in fine detail the politics of the most powerful and the smoldering demands of the most vulnerable and exploited” (pp. 3-4). In exploring the ways women fought in the Civil War we see that the fight was “among and between women and with the men who sought to control how they could fight” (p. 15). In the introduction, Glymph cautions historians about the dangers of affixing labels to the people they study because that runs the risk of conflating their legal, political, and social standing.
Divided into three sections, Glymph’s work tells the story of the divides within the South and North, parsing through the fractures within the respective regions instead of comparing regions. Section 1 discusses white, wealthy Southern women as refugees, poor white women and their role in the Confederacy, and enslaved women’s dedication to escaping slavery, building better lives, and enduring brutality committed by both Union and Confederate soldiers.
In chapter 1 Glymph argues that war made it “harder to hide the injuries that took place within and against white and black homes or to shelter the plantation home’s pretensions to domesticity wrapped in the claims of proslavery ideology” (p. 21). In short, this chapter provides a closer look at the shaken and shattered pillars of Southern society. She discusses women carrying contraband across lines and explains just how much they could hide and carry on their person. Furthermore, she analyzes how becoming refugees blurred the lines between wealthy white women and enslaved women on the road. In chapter 2 Glymph investigates the pull for poor white women to go along with secession and the war on the premise of “defending the sanctity of the white homes and the honor of white women” (p. 58). Because this argument “allowed them to access Southern white womanhood in ways previously closed to them,” they believed that they had a place in the Confederacy. However, when wealthy refugees invaded their spaces and attempted “to reconsitute their homes in exile” poor white women viewed them as threats and intruders, further demonstrating fractures in Southern society (p. 59). Chapter 3 makes a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on the dark side of freedom and refugee camps, stating “while refugee camps could be places of hope and were often transformed by black women into spaces for rebuilding community and ties of kinship, they were also spaces of suffering, disease, and death" (p. 120). Part of the beauty of what Glymph highlights in this section is the resourcefulness of women.
Section 2 presents the stories, struggles, and sins of Northern women. Glymph exposes class tensions between wealthy, middle-class, and poor white women through their varying abilities and inability to contribute to the war effort. She artfully demonstrates how middle-class and wealthy women could be easily blinded to the challenges poor women faced and their inability “to contribute labor, money, or time” to the cause (p. 145). She also discusses the pull women felt to support local societies that aided regiments from their cities or states instead of focusing all of their efforts on the United States Sanitary Commission.
In addition to war efforts, chapter 4 confronts “slavery’s tentacles” in the North by explaining how complex financial investments in the Southern and Cuban economies such as slave-grown sugar or wealthy Northern families who financed cotton or rice remained entangled with slavery (p. 154). Glymph contends that these connections posed significant consequences for emancipation and equality because the “leisure and wealth won from the traffic in slaves and slave-grown commodities” shaped their interactions and understandings of Black people, which affected the debates around the abilities of Black men and women to be good citizens, soldiers, and parents (p. 155). While some Northern women employed their time and “resources to raise money and supplies for Union soldiers, to go to the front as nurses, and [to] work with freedmen’s aid societies, others, like the Northern ‘secesh,’ saw the war as wrong” (p. 158).
Yet another group of Northern women saw the war as a brief opportunity to “satisfy their yearning to be mistress of a plantation” because Northern society remained deeply divided by debates about emancipation and racial equality (p. 158). In chapter 5, Glymph states that white women were not prepared for what they were getting themselves into when they went to the South on benevolence missions because they “believed they would witness degeneracy in the remains of slavery rather than evidence of humanity and viable black family and community life.” White women teachers and missionaries viewed “their role in part as ridding black people of the ‘vices which slavery inevitably fosters,’ the ‘hideous companions of nakedness, famine, and disease,’” demonstrating that Northern white women saw this as a confirmation of racial superiority (p. 172). Indeed, “the ways white Northerners thought about enslaved and formerly enslaved women and judged how they talked and talked back, how they looked and dressed, how they cared for their children, and how they worked drew on long history of racist ideas,” therefore making them “caricatures of true womanhood” (p. 194). These women refused “a sisterhood of equality with black women”; instead “they helped to refurbish the racial ideology that had defended slavery and would work to constrain black women’s lives for decades to come” (p. 195).
The two chapters in section 3, “The Hard Hand of War,” specifically cover the “convergence of home front and battlefront” (p. 201). Throughout the war, women across the country experienced a “borderless battlefield” as armies invaded their towns and homes. They quickly learned that “it mattered whether they were black, white, or Native American, rich or poor, free or enslaved” (pp. 219-20).
In chapter 6, Glymph discusses how many women drew on previous experiences and stories of the Revolutionary War because several women experienced harsh treatment by soldiers, exile, and life as refugees during that struggle for independence. She pays special attention to William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who personified the staunch stance the Union armies took as they “waged a war against Southern women and Southern homes” (pp. 199–200). Because of their patriotism for the Confederacy, the Union military viewed them as hostile and subjected them “to the laws of war,” which “permitted women to be turned out of their homes and, if necessary, authorized the burning of those homes and the crops that sustained them” (pp. 207–8). In chapter 7, Glymph provides important descriptions of what refugee camps looked like, where they were located, and how many people typically inhabited them. She reminds readers that Black women endured overwhelming circumstances because “their race, gender, and statelessness made them more vulnerable to the apathy or active hostility of Union commanders” (p. 248). Glymph demonstrates how Black women refugees created spaces behind Union lines capable of sustaining life, how ties from slavery assisted in supporting them in freedom and through the challenges they faced as refugees, and how “their efforts helped propel the nation toward emancipation and an entirely new world of freedom” (p. 250).
Overall this book demonstrates the deep divisions among women within the same sections of the country and highlights the contradictions of race and class in both North and South. Glymph adds to the important new work being conducted on how the war influenced many different groups of refugees and the specific issues they faced. Throughout the volume, she illuminates neglected narratives and provides suggestions on possible subjects for future studies about the lives of women during the era, such as what happened to the children of enslaved and refugee women raped by soldiers. This book would be a welcome addition to any undergraduate classroom dealing with this period because of the scope of experiences women encountered.
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Citation:
Shae Smith Cox. Review of Glymph, Thavolia, The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation.
H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55224
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